cover reveal for NEVER BEEN SHIPPED!

i'm OBSESSED with it, for the record

Okay, you know that feeling you get when the beat drops, when the anthemic chorus comes in, you know the way that certain lyrics just hit, the way that a song can express something deep inside you that you didn’t even know was there?

That’s how I felt when I saw the cover for Never Been Shipped for the first time.

Seriously, I got chills. Because this is THEM. This is THE BOOK.

Artist Jenifer Prince and art director Colleen Reinhart continue to blow my mind every single book cover. I’m so honored by their time, their energy, their attention, their talent. It’s like, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Put it up to eleven.¹

THEY ABSOLUTELY TURNED IT UP TO ELEVEN HERE.

His hand on the wall! Hers on his neck! His tousled hair, her shirt falling down her shoulder, the push and pull of it all, you can see from their FACES how much they want this! I also gave so many notes on John’s guitar because it had to be RIGHT, for JOHN, and it’s just perfect. I love all the cruise details, too — the porthole and the lifesaver² on the wall and the cute little anchor dangling from the title.

I don’t know what to tell you. This is my EXACT vision for the cover and also better than I ever could’ve imagined.

Here’s the official description of the book:

A band reunion may be enough to change two musicians’ tune on love in this electric romance from USA Today bestselling author Alicia Thompson.
 
Micah’s relationship to music is complicated. As teenagers, her band took off after being featured on a popular TV show, but the group barely released their sophomore album before breaking up. Now, over a decade later, the band is reuniting for one more performance on a themed cruise, and Micah is determined to learn from her past mistakes — no losing herself in the music, and no losing her heart along the way. 
 
John misses playing in a band, and mostly he misses Micah, who’d been his best friend until the music stopped. Back then, he didn’t take the lead, either in his guitar parts or while he sat back and watched her date another bandmate. John’s never been one to rock the boat, but he’s faced with another chance now that this cruise has brought music — and Micah — back in his life.
 
Onboard, Micah can’t help but see John with brand new eyes, and John’s feelings only intensify as the discordant band’s tension grows to a breaking point. With five days at sea, there’s a ticking clock on anything that might develop between them, and they’ll have to decide if their relationship is destined to be more than a one-hit wonder.

This is veering away from my next book and back to my last one for a minute, but I actually had a dream the other night that I was at an event, and the inevitable moment came up where you have to describe your book in a short, catchy way. This can be hard, and you can nail it one day and then find yourself floundering the very next day, like all your pithy little talking points just flew right out of your head. Or at least, that’s how it goes for me.

In this dream, I was definitely struggling, tripping over my words. “It’s about a baseball player who’s really going through it,” I said (god it’s dark how fucking realistic my dreams are sometimes, down to me describing my actual book in them), “and there’s this woman in the crowd . . .”

Then I had one of those half-awake moments, where I could feel myself coming out of the dream, when I became suddenly conscious that this wasn’t real. I wasn’t at an event. I was snug in my bed. I had to wake up soon to get the kids to school. I didn’t have to come up with a pithy way to describe my book, I could just . . . let it go. I felt such relief, like someone had come up to me and put their hand on my shoulder and said, “Hey, it’s okay. Wake up.”

If that all sounds a little strange, I’ll say that Never Been Shipped is a LOT about my feelings about creativity, making art, how cool and weird and sometimes kind of fucked up it can get when you put that art out into the world, when it gets all tied up in business, when it becomes your entire identity and then you have to grapple with who you’d be without it and if you could find your way back.

My stress dream about having to summarize a book is probably related to the fact that I always feel supremely unable to rise to the moment when it comes time to do fun, short little bullet points about the tropes to sell the vibes. Here’s my best shot:

💜 friends to lovers (more like childhood best friends to bandmates to estranged friends/former bandmates to lovers, if you want to get technical about it)

🖤 just one bed w/ a touch of “I always sleep better when it’s with you”

💜 forced proximity (I mean, they’re on a cruise, HELLO)

🖤 he fell first . . . like, way first

💜 guitar picks with lewd sayings on them (this is a callback to With Love, from Cold World, if you remember what Asa got John for Christmas!)

🖤 “he could play me like that”

💜 I put the same songs over and over on a t-shirt she wears lololol is that cringe or should I keep it

🖤 a love letter to emo music, like if you want the canonical timeline of ElectricOh! they formed around when Saves the Day put out Under the Boards (their best record IN MY OPINION) and then by the time Daybreak came out they’d already broken up

Okay, you see what I mean, I’m losing the plot, but that’s a little bit about this book! It is ABSOLUTELY my hottest book yet, and I have that on good authority from people who’ve read it! (I mean, I knew it in my heart, but it’s always good to have it confirmed.) 🔥

Asa, Lauren, and the housemates from Cold World do make an appearance! Most of the book, however, is set on a cruise, so there’s lots of fun stuff involved with that (folded towel animals! shuffleboard! casino!). I even tried my hand at writing LYRICS for the first time which is a whole nother newsletter. As one final selling point, I managed to work in a bad trade review I got as a Pitchfork review for ElectricOh!’s second album, which I am still CACKLING over hahahahaha we gotta get our kicks where we can.

Preorder links can be found here. And I will definitely be doing some kind of signed preorder campaign through my local indie, Tombolo Books, so stay tuned for more on that! It’ll likely be very similar to previous campaigns I’ve done, where some kind of art print or other swag will be included with the book, and you can put any personalization requests in the comments for your order. Your name, a doodle, a quote, a song lyric, a message, whatever! The more creative you get with it, the more I hear about it from the Tombolo staff whenever I go into the store, so I really enjoy it.

I’m going to be revealing the cover on Instagram later today, so please join me over there to share the love for it! If you want! I just had to give this newsletter a head start because y’all are the realest ones. I appreciate you spending this time with me.

I’m sorry, I had to, this is my favorite meme.

Currently reading . . . I just finished Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and I loved it so much. Her books do this weird thing to me, where I always feel SO intimidated to start them. Like I bought my copy of this book two years ago, when it came out, and it’s a beautiful edition. The hardcover jacket has that slightly iridescent sheen to it, you can feel the letters of the title and author name a bit if you run your fingers over them, but not too much, the edges came sprayed a deep navy and the pages occasionally stuck together in the most satisfying way as I was turning them.

Anyway, the book as a physical object is beautiful but the book itself is beautiful, and as a lesson I should’ve learned by now, Emily’s writing is actually so accessible and flows so nicely, I am immediately transported whenever I read one of her books. This one (to put it as reductively as possible) is about time travel, and has this “anomaly” at the center of it that several people experience spanning several centuries. One of the characters is an author on a book tour in the future, and my husband and I were talking earlier today about how you almost have to prepare WHAT you would say to an author about their books if you ever met them in real life, and I have decided that what I would say to Emily is the way she describes how that book tour feels, even though it’s by airship and taking place when the author lives on a moon colony, etc., is so fucking real. I’ll never forget it.

(Which, I mean. She’s a very famous author, she SHOULD know how a book tour feels! But it’s such a gift when people can describe things in a way where you know them VISCERALLY, and I think that’s part of what draws me into her books, the way they walk that sci-fi line with a real emphasis on the human frailty of it all.)

watching . . . My daughter still has me on Murder Drones, and today she was very excited to hear that I’d watched the third episode (The Promening, I am a SUCKER for a prom episode and that’s actually very central to Never Been Shipped, if I can tuck one more plug in here). She’d even drawn me art for it, which she gave me permission to share here! Isn’t she talented?!

listening to . . . I’m listening to the audiobook for Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginnbotham, which is as cheerful as it sounds. Interesting, though. I’ve also been listening to this week’s Taylor Swift playlist for that class I’ve been sitting in on. The theme for this week was “Time and Temporality” and when I tell you some of the things BLEW MY MIND. Just the connections and allusions and these different themes she comes back to. It really resonated with me. When the class is over, maybe I’ll write a newsletter just summing up some of what I learned?

Now you get to see MY rudimentary art skills lol.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc

2. I had a lot of self-doubt when typing this word, like wait, is that what it’s called? So I looked it up and apparently it can be referred to as a: life preserver, life ring, lifering, lifebelt, lifesaver, ring buoy, donut, safety wheel, Perry buoy, or Kisbee ring, then I looked that last one up and apparently it can be spelled Kisbey or Kisbie, I mean what the FUCK, surely we could streamline