Madame Jauffre’s Home for Wayward Poodles

The last assignment I completed at RISD was to — well, honestly, the prompt hardly matters. The point is I made a fake book cover for a nonexistent book: Madame Jauffre’s Home For Wayward Poodles. What you see here isn’t that picture.

Years later, a kid’s book agent contacted me to see if I’d like to pitch a book based on that cover. So, I made a new cover (pictured here) along with a couple images (also pictured here) and a manuscript about a very bad poodle. She shopped that around, and got a bunch of bites! Enough bites to take a chance on signing me to her agency (thanks again Kirsten!). Turns out editors love poodles. I was over the moon.

As it happened, over the next few weeks, every single interested editor passed on Madame Jauffre. It’s ok though. Eight or nine pitches later and one of them landed, and then another, and since then the work has been relatively steady.

We tried Madame Jauffre again a few years later with a new story and new images (also pictured here), and nearly made it again, but no dice. Turns out editors hate poodles.

(Incidentally, if you’re an editor who doesn’t hate poodles and would like to see Madame Jauffre’s Home For Wayward Poodles 3.0, please contact Kirsten Hall at Catbird Agency)