Hi! I'm Marie
You have gifts to share with the world and my job is to help you get them out there.
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Button TextLast year I was in a restaurant, typing non-stop to finish my book manuscript when I ran into my friend Toby.
We exchanged hugs and pleasantries. Then, he asked me what I was up to.
“Oh, just getting my ass kicked by this book manuscript. That and growing my team, running the business, writing and producing my show, building our podcast, renovating a house, spending time with Josh and my family — you know, the usual.”
He responded, “Marie, why are you writing a book in the middle of all those other projects? It’s not like you need to write a book. You’re already full and doing great work. Why did you take this on?”
“Honestly,” I said, “if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, everything is figureoutable is the one idea I'd want to leave behind. It’s that one thing I know, in my heart of hearts, that can make a difference — almost beyond everything else I’ve created.”
Toby got a little misty and said, “Marie, promise me you’ll put that in your book. It’s the best reason to write a book that I’ve heard in a long time.”
When I’m having a rough time or when a shitstorm comes to town, everything is figureoutable saves me. Those three simple words give me hope and strength. They calm me down. Get me clear and focused. It’s something I say to myself and others, practically every day.
But throughout this process, I’ve come to realize that everything is figureoutable is more than just a fun phrase to say. It’s a philosophy of relentless optimism. A mindset. A mantra. A conviction.
And it’s about to make you unstoppable.
Today, we’re celebrating because Everything Is Figureoutable is officially available for **ORDER**!!!
The book ships on September 10th, 2019, but don’t wait. Pre-order now and save your receipt. Because I’ve created a brand new immersive coaching experience that launches this fall. I’ll be teaching new material that goes even further than the book, all for FREE. That’s all I can say about this for now, but know that the *only* way to get free access is with your book pre-order receipt.
Click here to order your copy of Everything Is Figureoutable. While you’re there, hop on our book email list for upcoming tour dates and details about our online masterclass launching this fall.
Now, here’s a special behind-the-scenes MarieTV detailing the process behind bringing this book cover design to life.
The Design Process: How We Made The Book Cover No One Saw Coming
Getting Everything Is Figureoutable out of my heart and onto the page was a challenging process. It involved countless late nights, early mornings and more than my fair share of frustration, stress, and self-doubt. But writing a book is only half the battle.
Designing a cover that captured the essence of my idea was another crucial step. While the actual content is the most important component, the cover is huge. For someone browsing their local book store, the book’s cover design might be the only reason they stop to pick it up.
In today’s massively saturated markets, great design is essential to any successful brand. Design imbues emotion. Good design (on books or anything else) can make you feel something. It can ignite your imagination or energetically transport you to a world of new possibilities. While we can’t always put our finger on it, great design pulls us close and makes our heart say, “Yes please!”
Whether it’s books or soup bowls, we want to be surrounded by interesting, artful objects. No one’s ever “bored” into buying.
An uninspired cover design was NOT an option.
To be honest, I was really nervous about the design of this cover. I’m used to having complete creative control over everything I do. I like it that way. My creative team is made up of magical design unicorns. Not having them fully in charge of the book cover made us anxious.
Turns out, my publisher Portfolio/Penguin Random House was nervous too. They’re a well-oiled machine and design top-selling books for a living. This is their industry. Having a strong-willed author stroll in with her own experienced crew could be a blessing, or a curse. No one knew if we were gearing up for a brilliant collaboration or a total disaster.
Design is largely subjective. And high functioning teams — no matter how accomplished on their own — don’t always work well together, despite the best intentions.
Not going to lie. It was frustrating and messy at times (as the creative process always is). Plus, we had to do the bulk of the work during an extraordinarily busy time for our company (B-School!). But both of our teams learned how to trust and lean on each other. We gave ourselves permission to play, create, and find out what we were capable of, together.
Eventually, we found our way to a few beautiful covers. Some represented tried and true examples of what performs well in the publishing world… but there was one I kept coming back to again and again, even though it was completely unconventional.
Not everyone was initially on board with this risky choice. In fact, the cover I wanted (and chose) went against some solid testing data, and the advice of a few folks on our larger team.
But the cover we chose was the only one that gave me that full body “YES!”
A lesson I’ve learned time and time again is that you have to trust your gut, even if it goes against the grain and the advice of others. On today’s MarieTV, you’ll find out which cover we chose, and why.
You’ll hear from my legendary publisher Adrian Zackheim, Portfolio's Art Director Chris Sergio, and some uber talented people from Team Forleo. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to design a book cover that represents your voice and vision.
Last but not least, you’ll get to see the final Everything Is Figureoutable book cover. It’s something we’re all extremely proud of.
listen to this episode on the marie forleo podcast
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View Transcript
Marie: I knew that this idea had to be a book years ago and finally, you know back in 2017 was when I was like, oh, this is the year, this is when I have to start making this happen.
Adrian Z.: It was clear to us that from the very beginning this had been, Everything is Figureoutable. That was the title. So then the question is, what should be on the cover of this book?
Chris Sergio: We have a very strong title. Everything is Figureoutable, is a phenomenal idea and that alone is electrified, but then you have Marie, who’s this huge personality and you know she’s recognized around the world and she’s such a force of nature. The fight at the beginning of the process was, do we lead with the title type because that’s such an important message, or do we lead with Marie and a picture of Marie because she’s so well known and loved.
Marie: I was really excited to start actually seeing designs for the cover. I was so curious about whether or not I was even going to be on the cover or how we would explain this really simple but awesome idea in a visual format, but I knew the creative process is really messy and that it would likely take us a long time to get there.
So I had this little wrestling match going on inside of my head in my heart of wanting it done. We could just see it and be excited about it and then knowing it probably wasn’t going to happen overnight.
Geada Ford: In this process it was kind of strange because usually we do everything in-house. Our internal team is completely set up to help execute all of Marie’s great, crazy ideas, but this was really different for us because we had to team up with an external team with our publisher and we didn’t know how that was going to go.
Chris Sergio: I brought in ideas for me and my team. Marie brought in ideas from her and her team. So I thought I was just going to come in and present to Marie and I come in and the table was all laid out with ideas from Marie’s amazing design team, so I thought this could be really bad or really good and probably nowhere in between. It’s going to be one or the other.
Geada Ford: It was all about having that trust between our teams that really led to us feeling like we can hand over this incredible baby that Marie had been working on for two years at that point to be like, all right, it’s time to birth this thing.
Heather Hale: Whenever you’re throwing out ideas, you just have to put it all out there even if it seems crazy. So I mean we had, we had everything from the cover created out of like puzzle pieces, to make texts out of like a maze. I think Marie’s arm coming out of like a giant pile of like crumpled up paper. It was, we went to some wild places.
Marie: The first time I saw rough sketches. I’m not gonna lie, basically my heart fell into my stomach because I was like, oh no. That was like the little fearful part of my brain talking, but I had total faith that we would get there.
Geada Ford: So once we got over the hump of sketches and first round designs, which did not feel like us, started to figure out like how can we collaborate together instead of putting it all on the portfolio shoulders. How could we figure out a way that we could collaborate and share some of what we’ve been doing new in this space that they may have not known about.
Marie: I went back and forth. I had many conversations in my own head about whether or not I should be on the cover. We had lots of great iterations and sketches and possibilities of me not being on the cover where it was just about the word and the idea rather than deciding in advance that we knew which direction was best.
We gave ourselves permission to go full steam ahead in both a text, conceptual base cover, and then a cover that actually had me on it to see which one in practice was actually going to feel the best. And then we wound up going with one that we all collectively felt helped the best.
Heather Hale: We knew we wanted Marie on the cover and then we wanted to pair that with like some really dynamic texts. So it ended up just being a really good solution.
Geada Ford: It’s her words, it’s her brain. She’s really magnetic and I wanted everyone to be drawn in by what what her message is and there was no way to separate Marie from the message. At the end of the day, we could not have a cover that was just words. Like, it wasn’t real. It was her, her mantra, her message, her call to action.
Adrian Z.: She had brought in a mood board and one of the things out that mood board was a cover from Vogue and had Vogue, Vogue, Vogue, repeated it over a model sort of twirling, dancing. We really liked something about it.
Geada Ford: Do you do something that is so unconventional? But that’s exactly who Marie is and what Marie stands for and what she asked of all of us to stand up and do something that’s fun, conventional, and I’m really taking a risk when it’s needed because it speaks to your gut.
We rounded up a cover shoot in record time.
Marie: It was actually happening in the middle of our B-School launch. Right. And that’s usually a very, very busy time for our company at the time when I’m talking with a lot of people, I’m doing a lot of interviews. There’s, the schedule is filled up all day and I remember when everything started lining up in the calendar, I was like, oh, we’re gonna do a shoot for the cover of the book in the midst of the launch, like in the whole little section where it’s like the busiest and I’m getting ready for webinars in this that I was like, okay, fine. We’re going to do it. We’re going to get all them things done. Got this one day. We’ve got these number of outfits and we need to nail the one shot.
Which anyone who’s ever taken photographs knows you have to take hundreds, if not thousands, of images in order to get that one where you know the body and the face and everything is just emoting the exact type of vibe and feeling that you want to have on your cover, forever.
Geada Ford: We went into fittings working with the great Elsa Isaac.
Elsa Isaac: We wanted something totally different. If I’m already completing outfits in advance, then I’m too tied to what I think is going to work. And so it was really cool to just to experiment and try these colors and pieces that we’d never tried before. She’ll put on something and you’ll know, like you’ll know, like she’s feeling this one and then she gives more to the camera. So you kind of already know which one has the most chemistry out of the bunch.
Chris Sergio: You know, when I got back to the office and was able to start looking through the photos and it was a thousand plus amazing photographs, this isn’t even the design phase. This is just calling the photos, which I was managed to cut down to only 300 amazing photos.
Geada Ford: We started playing with colors and we started playing with jewelry and we started putting those things together and we just let go at that point and started having a lot of fun. But if felt like Marie’s personality really electric and really bold, and energetic.
Marie: Oh my goodness, when I finally saw the final cover, the one that we actually went with, it was like it was a full body, yes.
And so when I saw that cover, I was like, this is it. This is what this has to be. And it got me really, really pumped to take the book out to the world.
Adrian Z.: We thought, you know, maybe we just need to go with a more conventional cover. This is just maybe too challenging, but this one kept coming back and then eventually after quite a lot of soul searching, Marie just put her foot down and said, you know, this is really our cover and nobody here could really disagree with her because, well, when you look at it, you can see the power that it has.
Chris Sergio: If you can just wrote this down on a piece of paper, Everything is Figureoutable. That’s an incredible tool to hand someone.
Elsa Isaac: It’s about tenacity. It’s about creativity. It’s about commitment. How committed are you to making something happen? It represents hope, right? Because then you realize that, hey, okay, there’s, this isn’t the end and I think once you can tell your mind that it’s not the end, that just opens up a window and a life full of possibilities on how you can make it happen.
Geada Ford: To me it’s a mindset and it’s a way of going into this world knowing that you are capable of anything you put your mind to; to creating the life that you want to have.
Marie: This is the one idea that I would want to leave behind because it has been so utterly impactful in my life and in the lives of those I’ve had an opportunity to share it with so far.
If you’ve got these awesome dreams in your heart that you want to see come to life and have them live out to the world in a way that you’re proud of, you cannot rush the process. It takes time. It takes team. It takes lots of iterations. It takes lots of kind of standing back and feeling things, and then it takes kind of standing up for your vision too and standing with really confident in how you want to be perceived and how you want your ideas and your messages to live out into the world and the impact you want them to have.
So patience and also the power of your conviction for who you are and what you stand for. I think those two things are really important for every modern take creative.
After you watch, please pre-order Everything Is Figureoutable and Save! Your! Receipt!
Yes, I’m repeating that message. Your receipt is your ticket to an incredible online coaching experience I’m launching later this fall. It’s a brand new program that you’ll only get for free if you pre-order the book before September 10th, 2019.
Now, I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever felt frustrated or anxious in the middle of a creative process? How did you find your way through and make the tough calls?
Share as much detail as you can. Because hundreds of thousands of souls come here for insight and inspiration. Your story may be just what someone else needs to have a major breakthrough.
Important: please share your thoughts and ideas directly in the comments. Links to other posts, videos, etc. may be removed.
Thank you so much for watching, sharing, and reading all these years.
None of this would be possible without you. I am so grateful for the generosity of your time, attention, and heart. More than you know.
With SO much love ❤️,
XO
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