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Posts in the "Cover Art" Category

  • The Mystery Writers of America (a fine organization) occasionally holds panel discussions for its members on a variety of topics involving writing and publishing.  One of these discussions a few years back described the production of a book; the creation and marketing of the physical object.  On the panel were people from different publishing houses, each from a department that addressed some aspect of the process.  When they got to the people who did covers, there was much talk about how a cover is designed.  We in the audience heard from marketing, who talked about the need for bright colors and sexy images (“Hey, sailor, buy me a drink?”), and editorial, who spoke about the need to propose an idea that would grab people’s attention.  Someone mentioned the necessity of a good title.  Everyone on the panel had some input on the topic,and they all seemed to agree about the needs a cover should address.

    What they didn’t do was address the author’s perspective. 

    So I raised my hand. (more…)

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  • Carol Wolf and Tay, whose IMdB credits include Best Boy (Valley of Fear), Actor (Far From the Sea), and drummer in a punk band.

    I suppose the way things are going, in years to come when you pick up a book in a bookstore, a holographic menu will appear, offering you illustrations, or even illustrative animations, best-bits excerpts read aloud only to you, reviews, interviews with the author, maybe even interviews with the characters, “So, how do you like being in this story?” “Well, I think I’d like it much better if I wasn’t killed in Chapter One.” “What? You’re not the hero? I thought I was interviewing the hero!” “Of course I’m the hero! It’s not my fault if the author wrote the wrong book!”

    This would sound more fantastical if most of it wasn’t already happening, when you shop for books on line. Synopses, reviews, plugs, interviews, discussions and previews can all be seen linked to the book. (Shameless plug: For anyone who missed it, check out the preview for my novel, Summoning!) Meanwhile, in the bookstore, like a fisherman trailing a single line, just the cover art alone must serve to hook the fish.

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  • Books are visceral things. If you’re browsing in a store, or online for that matter, the first thing that catches your attention is going to be the cover. As a writer, this is your book’s chance to make an impression, and you want it to be the right one. The question is: what is the right impression? Your vision of the book is by no means going to be the way everyone else sees it, or indeed how the publisher chooses to market it. Readers will have strong ideas about the way a character or place looks, regardless of how detailed the writer’s description; think of the upset generated by the casting of film adaptations. Personally, I don’t like the reissues of books with a cover image from the film adaptation, and always choose to buy a neutral edition instead. But I don’t mind drawings or illustrations of characters in the same way – perhaps because an illustration seems less concrete, and more of an interpretation, than a photographical portrait.

    Osiris

    Cover for OSIRIS - I was dead chuffed with this.

    When I first told people that OSIRIS was going to be published, one of the most common responses was: I wonder what the cover’s going to be. Speculation was particularly avid amongst the House of Swift, where we have long discussed the potential covers of my potential books (my dad having worked in animation and graphic design, we’re an opinionated bunch about such matters). The other question I got a lot was: Will you get to choose the cover? Doubtless for highly successful authors, there must be an element of control, but as a debut novelist, you can only hope it comes close to what you imagine. And actually I feel really lucky with the cover of OSIRIS. When I was sent the artwork my first thought was, wow, someone has come up with that vision from something I wrote… it was a very exciting moment. I thought that the artwork captured both the scale of the city and its claustrophobic atmosphere. But my mum, for example, was convinced it was going to be a blue-toned design, and seemed more surprised by the choice of yellow than anything else. (more…)

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  • (not) Paul Tobin

    One of the things that constantly amazes me about the book publishing world is how little control over the cover that most authors have. As a naive youth, I pictured authors strolling into art studios, looking over cover designs with a critical eye, cuffing artists on the back of the head in justified displeasure, then sketching out a few quick designs which the artists would fawn over, gathering around like koi when crumbs are spilled into a stream, and then running off to their drawing boards to do as they were told.

    Oh no. Not at all.

    In reality, it’s more along the lines of a marketer telling an artist what to do, and then the artist doing up the art, and then a designer honing it according to several unassailable principles, and then getting the publisher to okay it. There! Done! Around about this point, there’s generally a moment when a marketing intern, new to her craft, asks, “What did the writer think of it?” At that moment the marketer says, “Oh, yeah… I suppose we could email him a jpeg to let him know how it’s going to look.” They do so, and then everyone returns to their cocktails. Most writers aren’t very much a part of the process at all.

    This, of course, makes it very difficult to judge a book by its cover. Horribly horribly hard.

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  • This week we’re talking about cover art, which is fortuitous. I just got a revised proof for the cover art on The Panama Laugh, and not only does it have a kick-ass blurb from Walter Greatshell; it’s also got a leopard-print airship.

    Mind you, the original proof, which I saw some weeks ago, also had a leopard-print airship. In fact, the book has a leopard-print airship in it, which is why there’s a leopard-print airship on the cover. The book also has zombies, which is presumably why there are zombies on the cover. Sadly, in the book business overall, that sort of thing is not as much of a slam-dunk as you might think.

    From the start, I had no doubt that The Panama Laugh would have an amazing cover. Night Shade Books is known for its great cover art, and this truly amazing and gorgeous cover designed by Claudia Noble, with art by Lucas Graziano, — about which I absolutely could not be more thrilled — is something rare and precious. But if you’re not a seasoned author, you may not understand just how precious it is.

    Look, the truth is that this isn’t actually my first book; it’s my first novel, sure, but then, it is and it isn’t. It’s actually closer to my 50th. It’s not even my first book with my own name on the cover; those honors have previously gone to seven anthologies and three short-story collections. I also spend a great deal of my life studying vintage paperbacks and dreaming of the sweats — and, not incidentally, admiring the art in the Hard Case Crime catalog. So I’ve seen some book covers. (more…)

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  • I held off on writing up this week’s post because I knew we were about to release the cover art for my second book, Infidel, and I wanted to speak about how both the covers for God’s War and Infidel came to be.

    Most writers are stuck with their cover art. It is what it is. If you’re lucky, you get to say something like, “Can that white chick with the sword on my cover actually have brown eyes or something? I mean, she’s supposed to be hispanic.” Or you can say, “Can she have a bigger sword?” But there are all sorts of things that happen with covers. Spaceships end up on books that don’t even feature spaceships. Protagonists of the “wrong” gender end up on the front – for marketing purposes.

    But if you write the sorts of books I do, which posit worlds that aren’t teeming with white people,  more often than not what you end up with is something like what Justine Larbalestier went through, which is that not only does your cover not feature your protagonist, but your brown protagonist magically becomes a white one for “marketing purposes.” (more…)

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  • OK, I’m here. I’m ready.  I”m gonna go all autowitter on this blog, baby.  Stand back because I’ve got the keyboard and they can’t stop me from writing the TRUTH!  Testify!  Cogify!  Sing it, sistahs!  Or something like that.  So, what are we talking about, again?

    Cover art?  Right.  Yeah!  Crap.  I suck at art.

    Seriously, The Spouse shows his buddies drawings I make to explain things like glenohumeral joints as a form of entertainment whilst they drink beer.

    “Is it a mermaid with a beard?”

    “Is it a elephant swallowing a turtle?”

    They think that’s just hilarious.  But they will rue the day.  Oh yes verily I say unto you that my revenge shall be…. off-topic. (more…)

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  • I’ve thought long and hard about covers. Maybe too long. I’ve actually done interviews elsewhere regarding them because I design covers on the side.

    I feel sorry for the folks who had to deal with me on the cover issue. I’m learning to be cool. To relax. I’m trying, really I am. I’m just excitable. (more…)

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  • So it’s important to have a good one, yes? You would think this would be intuitively obvious, but there are still tons and tons of bad covers out there. There are even websites dedicated to the subject! Don’t believe me? The most recent figures I’ve heard were that people use the cover as the primary factor in buying a book 25% of the time. The other major reasons people buy a book are because it’s an author they know, or from the recommendation of a friend, or a review from a trusted source. But 25% is nothing to ignore. Things may be changing because of e-books, but I don’t know that this particular influencer is going to change much. In fact, it may become more important as people have more and more to look at online.

    In any case, I think we can all agree that it’s important. So, first of all, I have to give mad props to my cover artist, the inimitable Adam Paquette. His art for The Winds of Khalakovo is not only breathtaking, it nails the feel and tone of the book. I loved it the moment I set eyes on it, and my appreciation for it has actually grown over time.

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  • If you’re a writer and you want to understand how publishing works, work in a bookstore. Brick and mortar bookstores are where the tires hit the pavement. Watching readers browse and how and why they buy books is a real education. (The whole system of browsing/shopping is something that eBooks have yet to figure out.) The bad news is, they do judge books by their covers. They also judge an entire book based on the first page — sometimes just the first paragraph. Authors know this. Authors also almost never get a say in what appears on their cover. (Unless it’s negotiated into their contract, and that almost never happens either. That’s a good thing, largely. Because most authors don’t know a damned thing about graphic design, let alone marketing.) Authors have no control on that aspect of things. That’s why getting a bad cover is so heartbreaking, particularly for a new author. I was lucky. Jeremy hired Min Yum to create the cover illustration. Min Yum is not only an amazing artist, but he also read the whole book and liked it. That doesn’t happen every time either. Usually, as I understand it, artists will base their illustration on a scene they’ve been given. Usually, they don’t read the whole book. There isn’t time. Usually.

    That said, who is my favorite cover artist? Understand, I’ve a degree in art. So, I’ve a number of them. (I notice book covers more than most folks, I suspect.) My first SFF cover artist crush was the Brothers Hildebrandt. They got me to buy Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara long before I’d read The Lord of the Rings. (Hey, I was in High School.) I liked their early work. I’ve long loved the play between light and dark. (Blame the Dutch Old Masters.) Right now? One of my favorite cover artists is the award-winning John Picacio. I mean, just look at his Elric illustrations. They’re amazing. And his work for  The Game of Thrones 2012 calendar? Really cool. I honestly can’t wait. Other cover artists whose work I admire: K.Y. Craft*, Dave McKean**, Glenn Fabry***, Tim Bradstreet****, and Charles Santore.*****

    Anyway, I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here. I’ve a book to finish and stuff. :-)

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    * Technically, she’s a picture book artist. Yes, I buy foofy picture books for the art. Get over it.

    ** His Sandman covers heavily influenced my artwork for years.

    *** He did the covers for a lot of my favorite comic books. Admittedly, sometimes his concept of human anatomy goes a bit wonky, but even then he invokes the mood of the book’s contents better than most. He’s what Norman Rockwell would be if he’d lived in Sin City. He’s fantastic.

    **** His pen and inks for White Wolf were incredible. He’s working on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and a number of other great projects. I’m glad to see he’s still busy. He deserves it.

    ***** Another children’s book illustrator. His Little Mermaid is breath-taking.

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