Book Covers

[ellenkushner]

I 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.

Comments

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

You've got it, basically - but it is also the year of her 75th birthday and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We wanted it to be an anniv. bash, but they were a little shy about making a fuss, I guess . . . when she allowed as how she would kind of like her own bat mitzvah, though (and you need to know that my mother is the person who tutored me in Hebrew and has a few adult degrees in Hebrew Studies), I encouraged her and decided to tack on the other family celebrations at the same time. It was kind of a stealth operation: guests at the evening's dinner who thought it was just her bat mitzvah were suddenly confronted by a blow-up photo from their wedding (very cute, if I do say so myself!). My uncle played the Anniversary Waltz, and everybody sang, and it was swell.