I Chose the Least Voted Cover. Here Is Why.

May 19

When I was putting Parenting Unpacked together, I made two choices that other authors warned me were risky. I left my author biography off the back cover, and I chose the cover illustration that received the fewest votes. Both felt right. I think they say something worth saying out loud about what I believe a book is actually for.

Instead of a biography on the back cover, I wanted endorsements. Real words from real people who actually read the manuscript. Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids, read it before it launched and endorsed it. Dr. Débora Pasin, a linguist and PhD researcher with 28 years of experience helping professionals navigate foreign systems and foreign languages, read it and called it deeply relevant and used the phrase silent transformations to describe what it does. I did not want to crowd the page with my credentials when I could have their words there instead. I trusted that real words would find the right readers better than a paragraph about me ever could.

The cover choice was an even bigger gamble. When Francine Marcondes sent over the options, I polled friends, family, and other authors. One beautiful, warm illustration won by a landslide. It was exactly what people expect a parenting book to look like. Connected, reassuring, pristine.

I chose the one that came in dead last: a Best Parent mug, tipped over, someone reaching for it, the coffee already gone.

Everyone who voted for the popular cover was voting for what they wanted parenting to feel like. But that was not my book. My book is for the parent who sees herself in that coffee. Cold, untouched, set down the moment a child needed something and never picked back up. The least voted illustration was the only honest cover for what was actually inside. I did not choose it to be edgy. I chose it because it was true.

Both choices came from the same place. Trust the work. Trust the reader. And choose the thing that is true over the thing that is expected.

The right reader will find it.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

I Chose the Least Voted Cover. Here Is Why.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What Is Identity Migration — And Why I Built Parenting Unpacked Around It?

I Chose the Least Voted Cover. Here Is Why.