Book Covers
Apr. 14th, 2005 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenkushnerI know I haven't posted anything serious in a while - I keep starting these brilliant little essays and leaving them half-finished because you won't believe what's been going on around here: 2 bouts of flu, 3 trips to NYC + shows in various towns (including my parents' 50th in Cleveland, which - thrift, Horatio, thrift - we combined with my mom's belated but wildly successful Bat Mitzvah), and 1 possible property purchase & sale . . . More soon, but meanwhile, please consider Book Covers. You know how the illo on the cover never seems to match what's inside the book, and how mad that makes you? Like, you want the cover to be the perfect illustration of your favorite scene, and it never is? - like, the heroine is a busty blonde on the cover but a 12-year old mixed-race Latina/Af-Am in the book...? (or the hero is a brilliant sociopathic swordsman but on the first draft of the reissued cover his sword is all limp and droopy.... but what of that?)
My first boss, Jim Baen (then) of Ace Books, explained the need for all this when I was a fiery young editorial assistant. He said that a cover is not an illustration but a marketing tool, designed to make people scanning book racks pick up the book, and that's all. Cause once your hand is on it, you may then flip it over to read the copy on the back (which I wrote a lot of back then!), and that gets you about 50% closer to buying the book . . . . I grant you, this does not explain why most covers are so offensive I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole; but then, if I were a typical buyer of anything, the world would be a different place, now, wouldn't it?
But enough merry persiflage. Here is the website that will cure your Cover Blues, now and forever. Really.
My first boss, Jim Baen (then) of Ace Books, explained the need for all this when I was a fiery young editorial assistant. He said that a cover is not an illustration but a marketing tool, designed to make people scanning book racks pick up the book, and that's all. Cause once your hand is on it, you may then flip it over to read the copy on the back (which I wrote a lot of back then!), and that gets you about 50% closer to buying the book . . . . I grant you, this does not explain why most covers are so offensive I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole; but then, if I were a typical buyer of anything, the world would be a different place, now, wouldn't it?
But enough merry persiflage. Here is the website that will cure your Cover Blues, now and forever. Really.
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Date: 2005-04-14 05:58 pm (UTC)Hi, I write romances, and I thought you'd be amused by a real-life cover disaster. One of the perks of writing for a small press like Hard Shell is that I can give suggestions about what I want my cover to look like.
Since my novel Star-crossed is about slavery and freedom, I asked for a man's manacled hand reaching for a star. Dirk Wolf created a gorgeous cover exactly as I'd requested, but as I studied the picture, I noticed the breast shape of the star and the unfortunate position of the man's fingers in relation to it.
After dubbing the cover, "The Galactic Grope," I requested that the hand not be so close to the star.
Decide for yourself if I have an overactive imagination.
http://marilynnbyerly.com/marilynnbyerly/firstcover.html
Whoops. ;D