Babel Clash

I’m pleased to be here, hanging out a Babel Clash for at couple of weeks. Should be fun. There’s actually a lot of different angles to look at covers from. I’ll start small…

Very cool that Jeff has always had input and creative influence on his covers. (Sounds like Paul has too.) As they both said, that’s not the norm. Readers ask me how much I get to choose my covers often, and I tend to snort in answer. Not much. My publisher (Doubleday) is quite happy that I write my books. They don’t mess around too much with the style and content of what’s in them, but they don’t seem any too eager to have me mucking in during the cover design process. They usually just float me a cover once they have one they’re pretty happy with. I look at it squinty-eyed and offer a comment or two, and that’s about it.

Paperback Cover - Note the Lack of a White Hand.

Small things they’ll work with me on. Like, on the paperback cover for my novel Walk Through Darkness, I sort of thought the guy’s hand looked too… uh… white. So I said, “Hey, the guy’s hand looks too white.” They said, “Oh, okay, we’ll shade that up a bit.” And they did. And for the UK cover of Acacia: The War With The Mein I thought Corinn’s dress in the first version looked too raggedy. So I said, “Hey, Corinn’s looking kinda raggedy there.” They said, “Right. We’ll fix that.” And they did. Same exact image, but somehow the dress became crimson silk instead of old burlap sack. That’s the sort of input I have.

Am I complaining? Not really. Not yet. I’ve tended to like my covers well enough. The one time I tried to have input, by suggesting a cover image idea for Walk Through Darkness, it didn’t work too well. The design folks went through several versions, all of them technically what I asked for, and all them looking like crap. None of them came close to what I had in mind, even though I could see that their efforts were true to what I’d described. By the time they chucked my idea and came up with their own thing, I was happy to say yes to anything so that the process would just end.

Hardback Cover

I don’t think the cover we went with is that great. Sales of that book dipped too. Do I think there’s a correlation with the cover not being right? Nah. The sales of that book dipped because – despite great reviews – the book is a literary novel about slavery. Not exactly a topic the general public rushes to. Not often, at least.

So I end up with a two-fold problem regarding covers. One is that I don’t feel entirely capable of designing and choosing good ones myself. Two is that even when a cover looks brilliant I’m not sure that corresponds at all to the book’s performance. Nor do I think a bad cover necessarily kills a book. Some of the biggest sellers in epic fantasy, for example, have cover art that just seems bad to me. As in, why didn’t the artist even get the physical proportions of the human body right? And yet, books with such covers have not only sold – some of them seem to actively attract readers.

For these reasons – and also because I’m not in the room when Doubleday’s sales team tries to convince the book buyers from a big chain store to pick up a book – I can’t claim to know what makes a good cover or why.

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