Wiscon: Book Covers
24/5/09 15:36![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyWith Margaret McBride, Gerri Balter, Steven H Silver, John D. Berry
MM: Let's start from the point of a reader. When you're looking for covers, what do you want on the cover?
JDB: Something that grabs my attention and accurately reflects what the book's like. I came into book design from walking into the bookstore and looking at the new releases, and something that I really wanted to pick up -- I couldn't because the design was so bad. In a bookstore, if it's not faced out all you see is the spine. So the spine is important. Then if you pull it out, you look at the front cover, and then the back cover. So the spine and book cover are very important but don't always get attention.
MM: Can you find some covers that did work for you?
SS: It depends on the book. I like colors that catch my eye. On a Steven Lee, book, it had a splash of orange that practically glowed. That's inviting. Covers that look interesting. This one on screen, I like it. I'm attracted to story. (The Geography of the Imagination). I want some element of illustration, not just text -- you don't find that so much in SF. A book with horrible luck with covers, and I'm not fond of the book itself, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. The first cover were blacks, blues, grays. Then the paperback was this hideous romance cover, a blond woman with a coronet and a little strand of DNA. It was a misleading cover. The publisher replaced that with a Celtic border and just THE DOOMSDAY BOOK. I want a graphic, something that ties in to what the book is about, a feel for the story.
GB: I wanted to talk about the spine. I don't want to put on my reading glasses. I want the author's name and title on the spine with big letters. The font on that could be a little clearer, but it's good. (Corambis by Sarah Monette.) I want an indication if it's going to have any graphic violence, which I can't deal with. You can almost always tell. I need to know these things. I like a book that doesn't mislead you like the "Oh, it's a romance novel!" I like this -- Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger. The title is big. She's wearing practical clothes. If I like the author I pay no attention to the cover.
MM: What publishers are doing is -- the art quality is very subjective. But sometimes, I'm like, they paid somebody to do that? If it is an artwork, I want some style, some pizzazz. I like abstract art so I'm not bothered by that. I want some kind of style. It can be a little bit cartoony -- Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. Babies are taken away from their families, and given to aliens to be translators. It's not seen as a particularly bad thing by the people who are doing it. At least there's some skill, some feel for what's going on. What are the publishers trying to do? Why is it that there are an awful lot of well-known authors who get bad covers? One publisher had a memo from a salesperson, and the idea was, I don't care what you English majors think, the covers that sell have half-naked women on them. There's a very definite awareness of perceived audience. That was what he needed on the cover. Why do these covers happen?
GB: I've been told that when the artist gets the commission, they're given a synopsis of the novel, but not necessarily the same synopsis someone would give of the finished product. The finished manuscript could be not quite the same. Eleanor Arnason's book was pulled off the shelves before it was published. It looked like a romance, and B&N wouldn't buy it.
SS: The paperback cover for Every Inch a King. When I published it I was talking to Harry -- authors have no say in their covers generally, the cover art or the cover text. Harry is a friend of mine. I might have asked him what he wanted. He wanted an illustration of THIS scene. Another house put out an illustration of that scene. Ours is -- not necessarily better. I like it better. It's a different scene. I copied out the scene, along with the physical description of that scene, and sent it to the artist. I said, make one of them look like Harry Turtledove, and the other ones look like you (the artist) and me. The publishing industry does not go to the author for help on the cover. They say, this cover isn't selling this season, change the blues to green. This font is too last year. The cover is driven by marketing.
MM: There are trends.
SS: Marketing doesn't get the whole book, maybe a chapter or a paragraph and a high-level concept. So they can't illustrate the book.
MM: The panel description says, wouldn't we like to see the woman with faces? There's an unbelievable number of covers where you don't see the woman's face.
SS: The marketing people say, if they don't show her face, the reader can superimpose her face on the main character. I don't buy it as an accurate reflection of what's going on. When I read a book, the main character usually looks like me... or my wife if it's a woman. It doesn't matter what's on the cover.
JB: Looking at this reminds me of, what's the purpose of a book cover? What's it used for? It has to be designed to look good small on a computer screen. Where do book covers come from? The idea of a book jacket is only 200 years old. They used to be sold as signatures, unbound, with just a paper to protect them. In the 19th century they thought, they could put the name of the publisher, the price, etc, on the cover. That's where a dust jacket comes from. At the same time, you were getting elaborate book covers on the book itself (not the book jacket). Now we mostly buy paperbacks, so... you have to live with that advertising forever. 99% of SF covers, I can't bear to look at on the shelf. I'm repelled when I walk into the bookstore's SF section.
MM: Let's talk more about what we don't like.
SS: I was talking to Gerri. A lot of the books I review don't have covers. It's a matte piece of paper (an ARC) with all the text, and a matte piece of blue or red or yellow. If you see that book in the store, are you going to pick it up? I have shelves with all the spines looking like that. The cover needs to do something. Even just one graphic element (E. Moon, The Speed Of Dark.)
MM: We don't like bland do-nothing covers. (Clay's Arc, Octavia Butler. Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords.) We don't like ones that are misleading. Ring of Swords doesn't fit what's going on. Same author, Woman of the Iron People, a friend of hers saw it and said, somewhere out there is a book about a prostitute who wanted to play Hamlet. This is the cover of that book. (It shows a woman with cleavage and a skull.) What else?
SS: Embarrassing. I'll start with titles -- Christopher Moore, wonderful author. If you're reading, Island of the Sequined Love Nuns, you don't want to tell someone what you're reading! You don't want to be seen in public reading Saturn's Children. Charlie doesn't like this cover either. The thing about hardcovers is, you can take the cover off. (How does this happen?) Heavy drugs, late nights with beer. This is supposed to be the MC, an artificial huan.
-If they had done an illustration of the first chapter -- with all these robots populating the gallery -- that would have been a perfect front cover.
MM: When I want to recommend the book, especially to my students, I have to say, don't pay any attention to the cover. I have to dismiss and qualify it. The cover of Johanna Sinisalo's TROLL -- it has those troll dolls with funny hair on the cover.
GB: I ride the bus. Can you see me in a city bus reading Scardown. I have to put a cover on it that makes it look bland and boring.
JDB: The type is jammed together, the color is garish.
GB: The book isn't about what it looks like it's about.
MM: Another category is, covers that don't look at diversity issues that are in the book.
GB: During Octavia Butler's lifetime, why is there a green woman on Mind of My Mind? They can't put a white woman on the cover b/c there's no white women in the book. They can't put a black woman on the cover, b/c no one will buy it. So she's a green woman.
MM: Ditto with Samuel Delany, Babel-17. Elizabeth Hand, Population, she's supposed to be an older woman. Does she look like an older woman? I like this Octavia Butler -- Parable of the Talents -- that's after she got popular. Now her covers have black people. Except Dawn. The character is a black woman. Student raised hand, and raised her cover and said, no one in this book is a person of color.
JB: We're describing failures of marketing. Successes of trying to reach the audience -- it's not necessarily that the cover is accurate. Marketing is a very good thing, this is what happens when marketing fails.
MM: I have bought these books, therefore I've contributed to making it seem like this is popular.
SS: Darrell Sweet is a very popular cover artist. Fans say his people are stiff, they aren't accurate. He's a very nice person, I love his landscapes. But Darrell Sweet covers have a tremendously high sell-through rate. His covers have an 80% sell-through rate.
GB: Is he commissioned to do art for highly popular books?
SS: Some are, some aren't. It doesn't seem to matter. He uses a very primary color palette. Reds, blues, greens. They're eye-catching. They make people want to buy them. (He does the Robert Jordan books.) The colors are bright, the style is clean but a bit cartoony. There's lots of little details.
--You see a whole wall of the exact same thing.
SS: We've only had one book sell all the way out, Outbound by Jack McDevitt. I don't think it's the cover. I don't like it, there's no color.
JB: It's appropriate for Jack McDevitt. Color -- leave it up to the designer.
-- I used to work for a major NY publisher back in the day. There were a number of hands in the pot. I art directed one cover that turned out to be horrible. I picked out a scene I thought would be visually interesting. I wrote out all the details of how I wanted it to look, sent it off -- the artist hated my guts b/c of this, he did his best, but he was also getting input from the publisher. It was a younger man, older woman, speaking of people you can't put on covers. She was 20something in a skintight jumpsuit. They said, suck it up. Things done by committee don't always work really well. Sometimes the art director has a clear vision and can turn it around.
MM: Who are they marketing some of these books with faceless women to? The Kushiel series, I thought they were marketed to woman. They were read more to women. But the covers looked like they were marketed to men. Lois Bujold wanted to get a large print version, and they said nobody old reads SF. Publishers don't have a handle on their audience.
SS: We're fans. We think of ourselves as the audience. If SF were only read by convention-going fans, we wouldn't have SF.
JB: The other side of that -- this (The WisCon chronicles, vol.2) is made specifically for a fan audience. The tiptree anthologies -- they're oriented to texture and color. They have a more literary look.
SS: Targeting the book cover to a specific audience. I was sitting down with Sarah Monette. I haven't been a big fan of her covers. They're not memorable. Muddy colors. That's my impression. She said, you're a straight male. Straight males don't like them. Women who like romance, and gay men, like them.
--Kushiel's Dart, that series, the headless women. I heard a rumor that the reason is that the artist they really liked, liked to paint women from the back. I wondered if the number of women shown from the back is because of the popularity of that series. Somebody decided that chocolate brown and robin's egg blue is the color for your bedroom. And so women drawn from the back becomes the style for this kind of fantasy.
MM: We want to do infinite sequels to a movie that does well. And we don't know why a book sells well.
--You imply that there are genres with covers that appeal to you...
JB: I would rather have a more understated cover, but that depends on the context. The marketers, cover artists, are also trying to think of, how will this stand out?
Sarah Micklem: They engaged me in the cover... and then they didn't listen. They made her into a pirate wench with her cleavage hanging out.
--Maybe they were trying to make these books not look like romance, with the woman and her face and her long flowing hair... Catherine Asaro's last few have been published by Baen. They're hideous, they look like the bad SF I don't read.
--I wonder, is it possible to talk about design strategies for "mainstrem/literary" fiction? Do genre books have different standards?
JB: Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies -- this looks literary. But a bookstore won't put it in both sections of the bookstore. They will only put it in science fiction. Any publisher larger than Incanabula has to put the cover image in a catalog LONG before the book is done.
--The main idea should be put forth for the reader. There should be something that's particular to THIS book. Otherwise it's bad marketing. I wish we would see more covers with women doing something.
MM: Let's start from the point of a reader. When you're looking for covers, what do you want on the cover?
JDB: Something that grabs my attention and accurately reflects what the book's like. I came into book design from walking into the bookstore and looking at the new releases, and something that I really wanted to pick up -- I couldn't because the design was so bad. In a bookstore, if it's not faced out all you see is the spine. So the spine is important. Then if you pull it out, you look at the front cover, and then the back cover. So the spine and book cover are very important but don't always get attention.
MM: Can you find some covers that did work for you?
SS: It depends on the book. I like colors that catch my eye. On a Steven Lee, book, it had a splash of orange that practically glowed. That's inviting. Covers that look interesting. This one on screen, I like it. I'm attracted to story. (The Geography of the Imagination). I want some element of illustration, not just text -- you don't find that so much in SF. A book with horrible luck with covers, and I'm not fond of the book itself, Connie Willis's Doomsday Book. The first cover were blacks, blues, grays. Then the paperback was this hideous romance cover, a blond woman with a coronet and a little strand of DNA. It was a misleading cover. The publisher replaced that with a Celtic border and just THE DOOMSDAY BOOK. I want a graphic, something that ties in to what the book is about, a feel for the story.
GB: I wanted to talk about the spine. I don't want to put on my reading glasses. I want the author's name and title on the spine with big letters. The font on that could be a little clearer, but it's good. (Corambis by Sarah Monette.) I want an indication if it's going to have any graphic violence, which I can't deal with. You can almost always tell. I need to know these things. I like a book that doesn't mislead you like the "Oh, it's a romance novel!" I like this -- Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger. The title is big. She's wearing practical clothes. If I like the author I pay no attention to the cover.
MM: What publishers are doing is -- the art quality is very subjective. But sometimes, I'm like, they paid somebody to do that? If it is an artwork, I want some style, some pizzazz. I like abstract art so I'm not bothered by that. I want some kind of style. It can be a little bit cartoony -- Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. Babies are taken away from their families, and given to aliens to be translators. It's not seen as a particularly bad thing by the people who are doing it. At least there's some skill, some feel for what's going on. What are the publishers trying to do? Why is it that there are an awful lot of well-known authors who get bad covers? One publisher had a memo from a salesperson, and the idea was, I don't care what you English majors think, the covers that sell have half-naked women on them. There's a very definite awareness of perceived audience. That was what he needed on the cover. Why do these covers happen?
GB: I've been told that when the artist gets the commission, they're given a synopsis of the novel, but not necessarily the same synopsis someone would give of the finished product. The finished manuscript could be not quite the same. Eleanor Arnason's book was pulled off the shelves before it was published. It looked like a romance, and B&N wouldn't buy it.
SS: The paperback cover for Every Inch a King. When I published it I was talking to Harry -- authors have no say in their covers generally, the cover art or the cover text. Harry is a friend of mine. I might have asked him what he wanted. He wanted an illustration of THIS scene. Another house put out an illustration of that scene. Ours is -- not necessarily better. I like it better. It's a different scene. I copied out the scene, along with the physical description of that scene, and sent it to the artist. I said, make one of them look like Harry Turtledove, and the other ones look like you (the artist) and me. The publishing industry does not go to the author for help on the cover. They say, this cover isn't selling this season, change the blues to green. This font is too last year. The cover is driven by marketing.
MM: There are trends.
SS: Marketing doesn't get the whole book, maybe a chapter or a paragraph and a high-level concept. So they can't illustrate the book.
MM: The panel description says, wouldn't we like to see the woman with faces? There's an unbelievable number of covers where you don't see the woman's face.
SS: The marketing people say, if they don't show her face, the reader can superimpose her face on the main character. I don't buy it as an accurate reflection of what's going on. When I read a book, the main character usually looks like me... or my wife if it's a woman. It doesn't matter what's on the cover.
JB: Looking at this reminds me of, what's the purpose of a book cover? What's it used for? It has to be designed to look good small on a computer screen. Where do book covers come from? The idea of a book jacket is only 200 years old. They used to be sold as signatures, unbound, with just a paper to protect them. In the 19th century they thought, they could put the name of the publisher, the price, etc, on the cover. That's where a dust jacket comes from. At the same time, you were getting elaborate book covers on the book itself (not the book jacket). Now we mostly buy paperbacks, so... you have to live with that advertising forever. 99% of SF covers, I can't bear to look at on the shelf. I'm repelled when I walk into the bookstore's SF section.
MM: Let's talk more about what we don't like.
SS: I was talking to Gerri. A lot of the books I review don't have covers. It's a matte piece of paper (an ARC) with all the text, and a matte piece of blue or red or yellow. If you see that book in the store, are you going to pick it up? I have shelves with all the spines looking like that. The cover needs to do something. Even just one graphic element (E. Moon, The Speed Of Dark.)
MM: We don't like bland do-nothing covers. (Clay's Arc, Octavia Butler. Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords.) We don't like ones that are misleading. Ring of Swords doesn't fit what's going on. Same author, Woman of the Iron People, a friend of hers saw it and said, somewhere out there is a book about a prostitute who wanted to play Hamlet. This is the cover of that book. (It shows a woman with cleavage and a skull.) What else?
SS: Embarrassing. I'll start with titles -- Christopher Moore, wonderful author. If you're reading, Island of the Sequined Love Nuns, you don't want to tell someone what you're reading! You don't want to be seen in public reading Saturn's Children. Charlie doesn't like this cover either. The thing about hardcovers is, you can take the cover off. (How does this happen?) Heavy drugs, late nights with beer. This is supposed to be the MC, an artificial huan.
-If they had done an illustration of the first chapter -- with all these robots populating the gallery -- that would have been a perfect front cover.
MM: When I want to recommend the book, especially to my students, I have to say, don't pay any attention to the cover. I have to dismiss and qualify it. The cover of Johanna Sinisalo's TROLL -- it has those troll dolls with funny hair on the cover.
GB: I ride the bus. Can you see me in a city bus reading Scardown. I have to put a cover on it that makes it look bland and boring.
JDB: The type is jammed together, the color is garish.
GB: The book isn't about what it looks like it's about.
MM: Another category is, covers that don't look at diversity issues that are in the book.
GB: During Octavia Butler's lifetime, why is there a green woman on Mind of My Mind? They can't put a white woman on the cover b/c there's no white women in the book. They can't put a black woman on the cover, b/c no one will buy it. So she's a green woman.
MM: Ditto with Samuel Delany, Babel-17. Elizabeth Hand, Population, she's supposed to be an older woman. Does she look like an older woman? I like this Octavia Butler -- Parable of the Talents -- that's after she got popular. Now her covers have black people. Except Dawn. The character is a black woman. Student raised hand, and raised her cover and said, no one in this book is a person of color.
JB: We're describing failures of marketing. Successes of trying to reach the audience -- it's not necessarily that the cover is accurate. Marketing is a very good thing, this is what happens when marketing fails.
MM: I have bought these books, therefore I've contributed to making it seem like this is popular.
SS: Darrell Sweet is a very popular cover artist. Fans say his people are stiff, they aren't accurate. He's a very nice person, I love his landscapes. But Darrell Sweet covers have a tremendously high sell-through rate. His covers have an 80% sell-through rate.
GB: Is he commissioned to do art for highly popular books?
SS: Some are, some aren't. It doesn't seem to matter. He uses a very primary color palette. Reds, blues, greens. They're eye-catching. They make people want to buy them. (He does the Robert Jordan books.) The colors are bright, the style is clean but a bit cartoony. There's lots of little details.
--You see a whole wall of the exact same thing.
SS: We've only had one book sell all the way out, Outbound by Jack McDevitt. I don't think it's the cover. I don't like it, there's no color.
JB: It's appropriate for Jack McDevitt. Color -- leave it up to the designer.
-- I used to work for a major NY publisher back in the day. There were a number of hands in the pot. I art directed one cover that turned out to be horrible. I picked out a scene I thought would be visually interesting. I wrote out all the details of how I wanted it to look, sent it off -- the artist hated my guts b/c of this, he did his best, but he was also getting input from the publisher. It was a younger man, older woman, speaking of people you can't put on covers. She was 20something in a skintight jumpsuit. They said, suck it up. Things done by committee don't always work really well. Sometimes the art director has a clear vision and can turn it around.
MM: Who are they marketing some of these books with faceless women to? The Kushiel series, I thought they were marketed to woman. They were read more to women. But the covers looked like they were marketed to men. Lois Bujold wanted to get a large print version, and they said nobody old reads SF. Publishers don't have a handle on their audience.
SS: We're fans. We think of ourselves as the audience. If SF were only read by convention-going fans, we wouldn't have SF.
JB: The other side of that -- this (The WisCon chronicles, vol.2) is made specifically for a fan audience. The tiptree anthologies -- they're oriented to texture and color. They have a more literary look.
SS: Targeting the book cover to a specific audience. I was sitting down with Sarah Monette. I haven't been a big fan of her covers. They're not memorable. Muddy colors. That's my impression. She said, you're a straight male. Straight males don't like them. Women who like romance, and gay men, like them.
--Kushiel's Dart, that series, the headless women. I heard a rumor that the reason is that the artist they really liked, liked to paint women from the back. I wondered if the number of women shown from the back is because of the popularity of that series. Somebody decided that chocolate brown and robin's egg blue is the color for your bedroom. And so women drawn from the back becomes the style for this kind of fantasy.
MM: We want to do infinite sequels to a movie that does well. And we don't know why a book sells well.
--You imply that there are genres with covers that appeal to you...
JB: I would rather have a more understated cover, but that depends on the context. The marketers, cover artists, are also trying to think of, how will this stand out?
Sarah Micklem: They engaged me in the cover... and then they didn't listen. They made her into a pirate wench with her cleavage hanging out.
--Maybe they were trying to make these books not look like romance, with the woman and her face and her long flowing hair... Catherine Asaro's last few have been published by Baen. They're hideous, they look like the bad SF I don't read.
--I wonder, is it possible to talk about design strategies for "mainstrem/literary" fiction? Do genre books have different standards?
JB: Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies -- this looks literary. But a bookstore won't put it in both sections of the bookstore. They will only put it in science fiction. Any publisher larger than Incanabula has to put the cover image in a catalog LONG before the book is done.
--The main idea should be put forth for the reader. There should be something that's particular to THIS book. Otherwise it's bad marketing. I wish we would see more covers with women doing something.