BlogTour: Trust Me, I'm Lying by Mary Elizabeth Summer | GuestPost- Cover Love & Giveaway

Publisher: Delacorte Press
Release Date: October 14th 2014

Fans of Ally Carter, especially her Heist Society readers, will love this teen mystery/thriller with sarcastic wit, a hint of romance, and Ocean’s Eleven–inspired action.

Julep Dupree tells lies. A lot of them. She’s a con artist, a master of disguise, and a sophomore at Chicago’s swanky St. Agatha High, where her father, an old-school grifter with a weakness for the ponies, sends her to so she can learn to mingle with the upper crust. For extra spending money Julep doesn’t rely on her dad—she runs petty scams for her classmates while dodging the dean of students and maintaining an A+ (okay, A-) average.

But when she comes home one day to a ransacked apartment and her father gone, Julep’s carefully laid plans for an expenses-paid golden ticket to Yale start to unravel. Even with help from St. Agatha’s resident Prince Charming, Tyler Richland, and her loyal hacker sidekick, Sam, Julep struggles to trace her dad’s trail of clues through a maze of creepy stalkers, hit attempts, family secrets, and worse, the threat of foster care. With everything she has at stake, Julep’s in way over her head . . . but that’s not going to stop her from using every trick in the book to find her dad before his mark finds her. Because that would be criminal.

“A sexy love triangle and madcap mystery . . . I loved this book.” —Jennifer Echols, author of Dirty Little Secret

“Buckle up! You’re in for a wild and funny ride. I fell in love with the fresh and snarky voice of 16-year-old con artist Julep Dupree. This book has it all: homework and hit men, prom drama and silencers.” —April Henry, New York Times bestselling author of Girl, Stolen

“Julep’s investigations and quick escapes keep the high-stakes story entertaining and readers guessing…” – Publisher’s Weekly

Cover Love

Thanks so much for hosting a stop on the TRUST ME blog tour, Amie! I appreciate the support. So you asked about my thoughts regarding the new cover design, and it turns out I actually have a bit to say about that. Let’s start with a little show and tell, shall we?

For those who don’t know, the final cover of TRUST ME, I’M LYING was not, in fact, its original cover. The first cover had some intriguing elements that fit the book perfectly, and I absolutely adored it. But before I go into it in more depth, let me show you what it looked like…

Julep’s internal struggle in TRUST ME, I’M LYING is all about identity. Is she good or is she evil? Is she real or is she illusion? If you can be anybody, how do you know who you are? The play of dark half versus light half of this cover really showcases Julep’s battle to understand her own nature. That feature was my favorite piece of the original cover, because I felt like it captured the essence of Julep’s conflict perfectly.

Lots of people ask me about the gun necklace, but it’s not part of the actual story. There is a gun in the story (a few, actually), but no necklace. The cover designer for this first cover happened to own the necklace and brought it to the cover photoshoot as a prop. The photographer took a few shots with the model wearing the necklace, and everyone on the shoot that day loved it. Hence, the notorious gun necklace.

But as time went on and feedback came in regarding the cover, the publishing team came around to the idea of changing it (for a variety of reasons, all of which are pretty common in the industry). So a new designer jumped on the project and began work on what would become the cover you see here…

It’s the same image, same scintillating gun necklace, but the dichotomy of light and dark is gone. I was sad to see it go initially, but it didn’t take long for me to accept this shift to a darker, more mysterious tone. For one thing, the book gets pretty dark, so the cover reflects that aspect of Julep’s adventures fairly accurately. For another, the story has many noir, hardboiled fiction elements to it, and this cover embodies that essence so much more than the first cover.

Honestly, I love them both equally for different reasons.  The first says so much about who Julep is as a person, and the second says so much about the story as a whole. The first pops out spectacularly from the shelf, but the old Dymo label-maker font on the second is to die for. I couldn’t have gone wrong with either cover, and that makes me pretty much the luckiest author on the planet. I loved not one cover, but two.

Follow the FFBC Trust Me, I'm Lying Blog Tour and don't miss anything! Click on the banner to see the tour schedule.

 

Mary Elizabeth Summer is an instructional designer, a mom, a champion of the serial comma, and a pie junkie. Oh, and she sometimes writes books about teenage delinquents saving the day. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her daughter, her partner, and her evil overlor–er, cat. TRUST ME, I'M LYING, a YA mystery, will be released by Delacorte in Fall 2014.

Win (1) of (2) signed hardbacks of Trust Me, I'm Lying + a "Grift" bag of goodies (US Only)

a Rafflecopter giveaway