Babel Clash

Ideally, a cover tells readers what’s inside the book, but also turns the book into a unique and precious object. It makes you want to touch the cover, feel the pages turning under your fingers.

When I wrote about Jeff’s new novel on my blog, io9.com, one of the first comments about it from readers was that the cover was incredible. In essence, something about the cover was actually helping to sell potential readers on the content of the book itself. Not only is Jonathan Coulthart’s art simply breathtaking (I’ve been a fan of his for a while now), but it stands out among fantasy/SF bookcovers because it doesn’t depict a cliched image.

By contrast, when I wrote about Greg van Eekhout’s Viking apocalypse romp Norse Code, complaints rolled in about how lame the cover was. It showed a woman, thrusting out her breasts, holding a sword. Behind her is some kind of glowy magical city thing.

A great post on the Orbit blog summed up the fantasy cover cliche: Out of a survey of fantasy novels published in 2008, they discovered that the vast majority usually contained a sword, a “glowy magic thing” and some kind of steed. It’s always stunning to me that publishers think that what makes readers pick up a book is a cover that looks like every other one in the genre. Despite the fact that Norse Code is a pretty great book, io9 readers said they’d be embarrassed to be seen reading it. The cover for Finch, however, intrigued them. It didn’t insult their intelligence; it promised them something rich and strange.

Book covers send a message to readers - in fact, they are often the first message that readers receive about the book if they are browsing. For people who read science fiction and fantasy, two genres that are often disparaged by literary and non-literary types alike, a good cover sends the message that they should not be ashamed of what they are reading. They are not reading trash so undervalued by its publisher that it simply contains warmed-over elements of other covers. Instead, they are reading something whose worth is reflected in the beautiful, thoughtful, or clever book design.

This is only going to become more important as readers have the chance to choose between ebooks and paper. Why buy an object you’re ashamed to carry when you can just download the text to your mobile?