Australian YA novelist Fleur Ferris has a vaster store of life events than most. Previous and current personal and professional titles include police officer, paramedic, mother, daughter, sibling, friend, student, teacher, speaker, rice farmer, traveller, holiday maker, city-dweller and country-dweller. Her role as concerned parent pushed her to an exploration that led to her first novel, Risk, about two 15-year-old girls seeking romance online. She spoke to Spine about the journey.

When Scholastic book designer Maeve Norton heard the title Bad Princess, she knew she wanted in. The nonfiction title by Kris Waldherr presents the tales of more than 30 real-life princesses, beginning in the Dark Ages and ending with Britain's current Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton.

"I don’t remember much of the early part of writing Girls In the Moon, because I started when the twins were ten months old and those months were all a blur. Maybe that was good for me! … I can’t remember much about where the ideas came from, but that’s what happens with many of my projects. I’m almost a believer in the Muse—some things just come to me, and they turn into something larger in a way that I can’t track later."

Over the course of his 30-year career, designer and art director Chip Kidd has created many of the book world's most famous cover images — the white boxer shorts of David Sedaris's Naked, the stunning, ruffled mane of All the Pretty Horses, the Jurassic Park T-Rex skeleton — and possesses one of the most well-known names in book cover design. Despite his iconic status, the designer told Spine he's made a career of avoiding a signature style.

Jefferson Hack has been fomenting publishing revolutions since launching the British underground-meets-runway style magazine Dazed & Confused (now Dazed) with photographer Rankin in 1991 while the two were students at the London College of Printing. With his most recent release, the revolutionary-cum-publishing magnate teamed with Kodak to push boundaries yet again. The book, We Can't Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack the System, features 5,000 covers, one for each copy of the book.

Long before she created her award-winning children's book "The Fox and the Star," before the prizes and acclaim, before the career, even before the university degree in Typography and Graphic Communication, designer Coralie Bickford-Smith had an idea for a story about a little girl.

After 27 years at Penguin Random House, Senior VP and Executive Creative Director Paul Buckley possesses an enviable amount of professional freedom. "It's up to me what I choose to art direct or what I choose to design personally," he told Spine. He and his staff oversee 16 imprints, annually shepherding more than 1,000 book covers and jackets through the design process. Buckley himself designs several dozen. But despite attending the School of Visual Arts on an illustration scholarship, Buckley had never illustrated for Penguin. "In all these years I've never tried to pitch myself as an illustrator to my team," he said. "I can always find someone far better than myself." Or could until Penguin decided to publish a series of well-known horror titles as part of its Classics imprint.

We know our celebrities. We watch them onscreen. We follow them online. We know what they eat for lunch, we know the names of their pets, we know for whom they're voting. We know them. Or at least, we know their public personas, their brands. Designing a book cover for a title written by a celebrity involves not only the usual herculean task of transforming a complex universe — that of the book — into a single powerful image, but also grappling with a person readers think they already know.