COVER REVEAL! Ask Me How It Works: Love In An Open Marriage

A cover one year in the making. Pre-orders are now open!

Hi there! It’s been a while.

The last time I wrote to you, I was about to get my body rearranged in the biggest surgery of my life. Today, I’m coming out of my hibernation with a joyful task—and one far easier than summing up the last three months of physical and emotional recovery in a one neat post (I’m going to be unpacking this for a looong time).

I’m so thrilled to share with you the final cover art for my memoir, ASK ME HOW IT WORKS: LOVE IN AN OPEN MARRIAGE, out May 1^st, 2025 from Viking Books UK.

Concept, design and art direction: Chris Bentham

Photography: Jeff Cottenden

A cover one year in the making

The process of creating the cover art for ASK ME HOW IT WORKS began one year ago—yes, a whole year!

Harriet, my amazing editor at Viking, kicked off the process with a one-pager capturing the book’s core audience, competition, tone of voice, key messages, and design objectives—and then generously let me have at it.

From my editor’s brief: some inspirational memoirs our audience will have read

Photographic or illustrative? For memoirs, the market seems to say illustrative

Having heard one too many horror stories from battle-scarred authors—and having seen some truly baffling covers for memoirs that made me wonder, how on earth did they agree to have their innermost lives represented this way?—I remember feeling both pleasantly surprised and reassured at being involved at such an early stage.

I also remember being tickled that ‘bring Deepa’s personality into the design: bold colour, warm tenderness’ was one of several design objectives.

And I remember being excited to hear that because of all the enthusiasm around the book, Penguin General (the division to which Viking belongs) decided to do things a little differently than usual. Instead of allocating one designer to work on the cover, the entire art department would be briefed, then invited to pitch their ideas. Wild!

First attempts: are we on the right track?

Three months after the brief, in March of this year, Harriet had some news.

We’ve seen a lot of design approaches, she said. (She never revealed the exact number; I suspect she’ll take this to her grave.) None of them are quite right, but would you like to see where we’re at and help us narrow down a direction?

Upon first sight, I remember being momentarily wracked with that excruciating feeling that any recovering people-pleaser will recognize.

How do I say that I don’t love any of these?

Even admitting this now feels painfully icky! Thankfully, over 15 years working as a freelance creative and learning how to give and take constructive feedback—not to mention 12 years of living among the brutally direct Dutch—kicked in and saved me from falling into the trap of playing nice.

We went through each study and broke down what worked and didn’t work, which ones I liked most and what I liked about them, what to discard and which ones to move forward with.

Which of these would you have chosen as a favourite?

Back to the drawing board

Our first big milestone came up in spring of this year. Advance copies of the book, called proofs—essential to secure support from influential readers and begin building word-of-mouth—had to be produced and mailed out.

The proofs are a marketing tool, so our marketing team hired a separate freelance designer to work on them. Could we use a temporary cover for the proofs, while the art department was still working on a design?

This time it was my agent Jo who put her foot down before I could. Sorry, she said, we didn’t love this one either.

By this time, a senior art director had been put on the job: Chris Bentham, whose covers for literary heavyweights like Deborah Levy, Colm Toibin and Nick Hornby (and recently, the new Ta-Nehisi Coates) I secretly fangirled over after lurking on his Instagram like the stealthy, low-key obsessive Scorpio that I am. Chris commissioned a piece of original art that became our first real stab at a cover visual.

And by this time, I was feeling the pressure. The book needed a cover, and though we had the luxury of time, we didn’t have forever. I knew Harriet and the team wanted me to love it. I wanted to love it, and there was much to love—the bold palette, the painterly swirl, the softness, energy and contrast.

But I knew that this cover wasn’t it. It looked like other covers I had seen before, and given an ambiguous title (Ask Me How It Works, but what is It?), it had to work harder to make clear what the book was really about.

A creative impasse: where do we go from here?

Fellow people-pleasers, you know it’s hard to resist the default setting of being agreeable. A small, sharp voice in the back of my head kept reminding me of how much my publisher had paid for my book, and how much resources they were pouring into it: time, effort, talent.

I felt conflicted and began to doubt myself. Was I being too much? Shouldn’t I just be grateful and accept what I was given? Maybe this wasn’t love at first sight, but an arranged marriage. Could I grow to love this cover in time?

I think this was the first time it felt like a stalemate, an impasse. It could have gotten hairy. As my publisher, Viking wields the power here. They could have railroaded me—pushed on and called it a business decision, and I would have had to accept.

But this is also where I saw that at the heart of this business are people with heart. Because it could have gone that way, but it didn’t.

From Harriet and my amazing team, I’ve only ever felt the utmost respect and care for my work and my story, and for how deeply my life, personality, and the people I love are entwined in it.

And isn’t this all we authors want—to feel that we truly matter? Not just on publication day, or when our books sell, but every step of the way?

We agreed on a compromise. The first run of proofs would feature this cover, plus a special touch that our marketing genius Kayla came up with: a wrap featuring the questions I answer in the book, making it an enticing, intriguing package to undress, I mean, uncover. The proofs went out at the start of the summer (later than planned, because I had my mastectomy in June, plus two surgeries more from complications), buying Chris more time to work on our final cover.

I’m proud of myself for trusting my instincts and standing firm. And I’m incredibly grateful that Harriet and Chris didn’t kill me, and instead exercised an unearthly patience and understanding, not to mention flawless professionalism.

Otherwise we wouldn’t have arrived at this.

Nailed it!

In the Philippines, we have a saying about marriage: Sa hinaba-haba ng prusisyon, sa simbahan din ang tuloy. It was a long procession, but it got to the church in the end. If something is meant to be, no matter how long it takes, it will get there.

We met again in autumn: two months into my recovery from reconstructive surgery, six months from publication, and a full year after the design brief. Harriet, Chris and the team had been busy.

This time, it was, without a doubt, love at first sight.

Chris worked with still life photographer Jeff Cottenden to create a photograph that brought together so many intangibles and made them visual. A single image with a knowing wink and arched eyebrow, a nod to the idea of multiplicity, with a surprising touch. To me, this image is real and tender, imperfect and vulnerable (those tiny delicate veins in the pod, I just love), open and unexpected, and just the right amount of cheeky.

I love the colors, because tell me fuschia and saffron yellow don’t say India to you. And I love the pearl. I am the pearl!

For me, it’s a reference to where I come from: the Pearl of the Orient, ang Perlas ng Silangan, the Philippines (even if Chris didn’t intend it that way). The Philippines is pearl country. We Filipinas love our pearls—if you sit on a beach in the Philippines long enough, someone will come along to sell you pearls, and if you want to pick a Filipina out from a sea of Asian women, just look for the pearl earrings.

Our cover blurbs are from the brilliant

Clover Stroud

, who has been so generous with her encouragement (and Substack recommendations!), and from Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, whose book The Sex Lives of African Women was one of my biggest inspirations as I was writing mine.

Things I learned along the way

If I had to sum up what I learned from the year-long process of arriving at this final cover design, it’s these three things.

Trust your instincts. It’s so tempting to bend over backward, especially when resources are being poured into your work. But believe you are worth all that. Know when to play ball and when to stand firm, how to choose your battles, and how to communicate your stand respectfully.

Trust your team. They have expertise that you don’t, and insight and perspective shaped by years of playing in a highly competitive marketplace. Respect that, and appreciate it—and that it’s being employed in the best interests of your book.

Trust the process. Ideas need time to percolate. Creativity needs room and trust to grow. When the book was first acquired, I remember feeling like a year and a half was too long to wait until publication. But now I understand—time gives people in an overworked, understaffed industry the greatest possible opportunity to do their best work.

There are loads of things about this process I’ll never know. I’ll never know how many times Harriet nearly got clobbered by an art director whenever she said ‘It’s just not Deepa enough!’ How many designers pitched their ideas, how many notebook pages Chris sacrificed to this project, or how many peas (frozen or fresh?) rolled onto Jeff’s set that day.

But this I know for sure:

I love everything about this cover. I love how it captures so much of what’s unique and special about the book in a way I never could have dreamed up on my own. Most of all, I love that it was a product of talent and creativity as much as it was of care, communication, mutual respect, and a whole lot of trust.

I hope you love it, too.

Pre-order your copy today

Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage is now available for pre-order!

UK readers can order the hardback from Bookshop.org, Waterstones, Blackwells and Amazon UK—all those links here.

International readers can pre-order the ebook on Amazon UK, Amazon NL, Amazon Italia and Amazon Spain (so far). If you find my book on your country’s Amazon site, will you let me know so I can update the links?

There will be audiobooks in English and Dutch, and translations in Dutch and German, too. But I think we’ve all had enough excitement for today! And now I need to lie down for a week.

I’d love to hear from you: what do you think of our cover?

Sending you much love from Amsterdam, until next time.