A good cover catches the reader's eye and encourages them to pick it up. Titles are important, but I think it is much harder to come up with an intriguing title.
I never saw writing as a career or a profession and for most of my life, I wrote non-fiction. In addition to my day job, I did research on historic houses and the people who lived in them and filled out forms on those buildings for a state inventory. I did articles on history for the local paper. I wrote a bicentennial history of a school. I think my wildest dreams growing up were to go into costume design for the theater.
