Winners of the “Make Our Cover Suck Less” contest

Recently, we asked readers to brainstorm cover layout ideas to help us out, and promised a free copy of the first issue of Smash Cake to the person who mentioned something we used in our final version.

Well, after several blog comments and tons of off-site emails, we ended up with a three-way tie.

Congratulations to Ben White, Roxane Gay, and Kaolin Fire, who each emailed us a mockup version of the cover elements in an eerily similar format—and on the same night!

Obviously, great literary minds think alike. Because that’s just cool.

Their solution was to move the bleed to the cut side and rearrange the text data toward the opposite margin of what we’d been picturing so far at the time. Such a simple idea, really, that I feel a little dumb for not having thought of it myself. But hey, the best ideas are the ones which have that immediate “Eureka!” feeling, those are often the ones that really work, and we were lost in forest-trees mode and the pressure of deadlines.

It’s all better now.

And it’s so, so pretty.

Thanks to Ben, Roxane, and Kaolin for the suggestion!