The Title, the Cover, and the Trailer

“How did you come up with the title?”

All my books contain an alliteration indicating the book’s themes and settings along with the prime location of the story. (“Bullets, Butterflies, and Italy”: the threat of violence, the first stirrings of new love, and… Italy) (“Bulls, Bands, and London”: the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the hero’s love of Britpop music, and… London).

So in Shadows, Shells, and Spain, I immediately had the prime location (Spain) and one of the main symbols of the Camino (the shell). But I didn’t have that third piece of the puzzle.

On the final morning of my journey, I was casting long shadows as I followed this lone woman towards Santiago de Compostela. When I passed her, she sighed in relief, “Thank goodness. I was tired of trying to escape your shadow.”

A few minutes later, it hit me. I could employ the word, “shadow,” to represent one of my book’s major themes: that your troubled past can often hold you back as you try to advance to a happier future. Shadows, Shells and Spain: now there’s some perfect alliteration!

“How did you come up with the cover?”

Shadows, Shells, and Spain is definitely not the first book to take place on the exhausting and exhilarating Camino de Santiago. Even if you do a cursory search in Google Chrome, you will be presented with dozens of books about the Camino.

However, my book is presented as a fictional travel memoir i.e. a travel book packed with accurate local descriptions and historical anecdotes—inside a completely fictional story following a desperate husband in search of his estranged and mysterious wife.

Now look again at your Google search of Camino books. They’re all so brown! Most of those covers represent the dreaded Meseta section of the Camino path, “the two-hundred-kilometer stretch of barren plateau that lies in the center of the country. Pilgrims complain of its dry heat, lack of shade, limited food resources, non-existent landmarks, and drab scenery.”

So why would you want to showcase that kind of scenery for your book cover? Will that kind of cover inspire a reader to temporarily leave his or her family and friends to walk 800 kilometers across northern Spain? Probably not…

So just like how the interior of my book represents a different kind of Camino book, I wanted the exterior of my book to represent a different kind of Camino as well. When I walked the path in June of 2014, most of the landscape was green and lush and absolutely lovely. Therefore, I was determined to create a cover that reflected that majestic beauty and chose one of my photos from a stretch of road outside Los Arcos. Green, lush, lovely, perhaps inspiring enough to encourage you to temporarily leave your family and friends to walk 800 kilometers across northern Spain.

“How did you come up with the trailer?”

The trailer has little to do with the book and everything to do with providing an accurate summary of my Camino journey. Every day I took short videos reflecting the ever-changing landscape: 193 videos in all, ranging from five to thirty seconds. When you put them all together, the entire video sequence was 62 minutes long.

So I started to trim the fat, deleting the shakiest parts (I refused to stop and take these videos; this was a long march, so I kept moving…), and erased any scenery that felt like a carbon copy of something you saw seconds earlier. Sixty-two minutes became thirty minutes which became twenty minutes which became a tight nine minutes then an even tighter five minutes. Stabilized the video, added two tracks from the YouTube library and here we are! (And yes, I only had a total of 90 minutes of rain!)

For more inspiring stories about the Camino experience, check out:

https://www.johnmeyerbooks.com/beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt/

https://www.johnmeyerbooks.com/bulls-vs-camino/

https://www.johnmeyerbooks.com/top-4-enemies-of-the-camino/

https://www.johnmeyerbooks.com/why-you-should-walk-the-camino/

And for more information on Shadows, Shells, and Spain… click “Books” in the above menu!