I am beyond excited to reveal here the cover for the first book in a brand-new illustrated chapter book series of mine. Check it out below!

The series, My Mad Scientist Mom, is all about Ari — that boy in the stinky orange T-shirt up there — and his Mom, Professor Fingerman, who is (as you might’ve guessed) a MAD SCIENTIST. Each book in the series sees Ari’s Mom attempting to solve one domestic problem or another with a mad science-y solution.

In Saved by the Smell, the problem is laundry. Neither Ari nor his mom have done it a long time (which is why Ari’s T-shirt is so stinky and why his mom’s lab coat is covered in stains). When confronted with this problem, Ari suggests that he and his mom just suck it up and, as much as they dislike doing laundry, spend the day washing and drying all their clothes. A sensible idea, right? Unfortunately, though, the Fingerman’s washing machine is currently out of commission. Ari’s mom accidentally sort of blew the thing up . . . But that’s nothing to worry about, Professor Fingerman assures her son. Why? Because she has built a time portal. This device will allow Ari and his mom to travel back in time. Six weeks back in time, to be exact, which was the last time Ari and his mom did laundry. Once in the past, Ari and his mom will gather up all the freshly laundered clothes they can, leap back into the present, and — voila! — they’ll have enough clean T-shirts and lab coats to last them few another six weeks. It’s a good plan. But Professor Fingerman’s plans have a tendency to go a bit awry, and in this case (as you might’ve also guessed after taking a look at the book’s cover), they very much do.

As entertaining and lovable as I hope you’ll find Ari and his mom, they aren’t the only characters you’ll find in these books. You’ll also meet Fred, Ari’s lettuce-obsessed pet turtle, as well as TED, a snooty, ice cube-sized supercomputer that (much to Ari’s annoyance) serves as his mom’s pseudo-assistant. There’s also the Fingerman’s next door neighbor, Mr. Jakes, an awkward, somewhat bumbling but well-intentioned man who seems oddly eager to get to know Ari and his mom.

That’s as much as I’ll tell you about this first book in the My Mad Scientist Mom series, as I don’t want to spoil anything. But there are two more things about this series (and this first book’s cover in particular) that I want to share about with you.

Number 1:

I, Jarrett Lerner, really truly do have a scientist for a mom. But, I should probably add, she is not a MAD scientist. I should probably also say that Professor Fingerman, the character, is not based on my mom (she would never avoid doing laundry for six whole weeks). However, the design of the character is very much based on my mom. Specifically my mom back when I was Ari’s age. Here’s a picture of us at that time:

The two of us certainly look a lot less panicked (and more clean) than Ari and his mom do on the cover of Saved by the Smell, but I hope you can still see the resemblance.

The second thing about this book cover that I thought I’d share with you is this: IT TOOK ME FOREVER. I mean, every book cover takes me a long time, and before landing on a final design, my team and I always try a whole bunch of different things. But the process behind this one was particularly lengthy, and I think that pulling back the curtain and sharing a bit more about it all could be illuminating, interesting, and maybe even instructive. So, here it is — the story of how this book cover (and how all book covers, generally speaking) get made . . .

Making books are a team effort, and in terms of the cover, there are three important team members you need to know about. One, pretty obviously, is the illustrator (who in the case of Saved by the Smell also happens to be the book’s author, but a lot of times is not). The other two are the art director and cover designer. (Sometimes, as was the case with this book, the art director and cover designer are the same person, but not always.) The cover designer’s job is to develop and pitch a handful of possible cover concepts, considering things like how the book will look on a shelf, how it will compare to other books similar to it, and what potential readers will make of it all. Once those concepts are ready to be shared, the art director will work with the illustrator to help them execute those concepts. For Saved by the Smell, I was pitched three concepts, and because I thought they were all strong and didn’t feel immediately drawn to one or another, I decided to do sketches of all three.

Once my art director had received these sketches, she brought them to a meeting with a bunch of other people at my publisher — not just my editor and design team, but also sales and marketing people, who will be the ones in charge of promoting the book, and know a lot about what the purchasers of books are excited by and attracted to.

Ultimately, Concept #1 was ditched. It was a bit too busy, and we knew that the amount of space all the elements took up might prevent us from being able to fit both the series’ and book title on the cover in a way that didn’t make it feel squeezed-in or crunched.

The next step was to more carefully draw each of the remaining concepts, and to also add color.

My team seemed to be leaning toward Concept #2 — but at this point in the process, I was leaning toward Concept #3. Something about the framed, slightly askew picture on the wall captured this feeling of wonky domesticity that is very much a part of the series and that I loved having at the forefront of things. (You can also see, at this point, that we were playing around with a couple different approaches to the “series and title treatment” — the words on the cover, that is, and how they are rendered.) We went back and forth and back and forth some more, weighing the pros and cons of one versus the other, seeking the feedback of even more people, and looking at dozens (maybe even hundreds) of other book covers (especially those that we deemed either super successful or super unsuccessful).

Depending on how familiar you are with the book-making process, it might sound strange to you that the concept that I — the book’s author-illustrator, after all — was leaning toward wasn’t the one that was ultimately chosen. And honestly, if I had pushed and insisted that Concept #3 was the one I wanted, my team probably would’ve gone along with it. But I would be a fool not to seriously consider the opinion of every single member of my team. Saved by the Smell will be my 21st published book, and thanks to that team of mine, each of those books is way, way, WAY better than it would’ve been if I’d made it alone.

In the end, we decided to move forward with Concept #2. And what did it for me, what finally convinced me that my team was on to something, was the thing that always steers me in the best direction when I’m unsure about something related to my books and the work I do around them. I put myself, as best I could, in the heads of my readers. Which of these cover concepts, I asked myself, would a kid be more excited by? Which of these cover concepts would be more likely to get a kid picking up the book and reading? The kids, of course, are the most important thing. And reminding myself of that always helps set me straight and make good decisions.

So, that was that — Concept #2 it was. And that’s when the real work started . . .

My art director and I took a hyper-critical look at every element of the artwork, questioning how it each bit could, and whether it should, be changed to improve the thing. Before starting this part of the process, it’s super important to state, as clearly and specifically as possible, what the goal of the image is. As with a lot of covers, our goal was to interest and excite potential readers while (1) showing them some (but not all) of what they’d find inside the book and (2) including some fun, subtle details that would be more meaningful (and delightful) to them once they’d finished reading the book. Another thing I think about, as I do when I’m revising the insides of my books, too: each page of a book (whether full of text, art, or some of both) is the result of dozens, even hundreds of decisions. I try to identify each of those decisions, whether consciously or unconsciously made. This jolts me out of my own reflexive perspective, helping me consider things from a more detached, critical standpoint.

Eventually, we ended up here:

As you probably noticed, the dinosaur has become more vicious and is now running toward the viewer, as are Ari and his mom. Also, the background has gotten more dynamic, with a more curved horizon line, a variety of mountain heights, and a volcano mid-eruption. But even after all these tweaks, we still weren’t done. Because now it was time to add color. And for me, color is often the most challenging part. I mean, there are just so many of them. Colors, that is. Like, sure — maybe you know the grass in your drawing should be green. But what kind of green? What hue? And should it all be the same green, or a few different shades?

I’m not going to show you all the iterations I went through during the coloring process (there are way too many). I’m just going to show you two: the final one, and the one that came right before it, which we nearly went with. Here’s the latter:

As you can see, these colors are mostly realistic, though the sky does have a slight, mad science-y vibe to it. And for a while, this was it. My art director and I were just figuring out some final details (whether the clouds in the sky and those rising up out of the volcano should be outlined, how the tones of the mountains should vary, etc.) before moving onto the series and title treatment.

But then she (my art director) had a brilliant burst of inspiration. She asked if I wouldn’t mind playing around with a more nighttime-y, otherworldly palette for the cover’s background, amplifying that mad science-y vibe that the first version only kind of showed. And that is how we (eventually — because yes, there were a bunch more iterations in our attempt to accomplish this) got to here:

If you’ve got a good memory and a sharp eye, you might’ve noticed that, at this point, we still hadn’t figured out the series and title treatment. That was a whole long process in itself. (There were at least half a dozen different versions of the beaker that stands in for the “A” in the series title’s “MAD.”) And it was also only at the very end of the process (a day or two, I think, before the cover art was set to feed out to the public and begin appearing on my publisher’s and all online retailers’ websites) that we decided to outline all of “My MAD SCIENTIST Mom” with a white border, making it pop out a bit more and grab a tad of the focus back from the dinosaur. (And if you’ve got a very sharp eye, you might even be able to tell that, also at the last minute, the color of the sky was brightened just the slightest bit. Seriously, the edits never end.)

And there you have it. Did you know just how much work went into making a book cover? At school visits, when kids ask me about covers, I always start by quoting that age-old advice: “Never judge a book by its cover.” I tell them that this is excellent advice — for everything BUT book covers. Because, as you now know if you didn’t before, a whole lot of people put a whole lot of time and effort into making sure that people judge these covers we make. We just want to make sure the judgements they make are precisely the ones we want them to.

If you read all this, THANKS! I hope it’s increased your excitement for this new series of mine. Saved by the Smell comes out March 4th, 2025 (with Book 2 to follow later on in the year), but is already available for preorder wherever books are sold. As always, if you preorder the book from my local independent bookstore, the Silver Unicorn, I will sign, doodle in, and personalize (if you want) your copy or copies. You can click HERE to do that.

~ Jarrett