What They Said

Reading The Rap Sheet's latest post doesn't quite make me want to slit my wrists in protest, but you kind of have to wonder if just a leetle bit of due diligence on the production design team at the publishing house's part would have helped a tad.

Although I would like to hear the other side of the story with regards to cover image choice. Are there only a select number of stock images to choose from? Is it a matter of tight deadline crunches and too many committees? Because it's kind of like titles: they may not be copyrighted per se, but once an image has been slapped on one book's cover, the next one almost always suffers by comparison.

Comments

[Sandra Scoppettone]

They don't care, Sarah. I wrote about covers over a year ago. Not the twinning aspect but that no one draws or paints anymore. It's all stock images and there are lots of them, but they don't care if a cover is repeated. NOBODY IN PUBLISHING CARES ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT THE BOTTOM LINE.

[Neil Nyren]

Well, here I've got to say something, Sarah. It's not as if publishers possess vast archives of all the book jackets ever used. Copy? Unless a book jacket image is famous, we don't even know it's been used before. Due diligence? How exactly? Search every book on Amazon? We just want something that looks good, expresses the book, and draws a customer's notice to the book in such a way that he or she picks it up. When the art department brings me something, I look at it and say I like it or I don't like it or why don't we try this or that to it. When we get something that works, I show it to the author, and if he or she likes it, too, then we go ahead. That's it, that's how it works. But I've got no way of checking if some book out there somewhere also has something similar. And, frankly, given the number of books that're published every year, I think it's somewhat of a miracle that it doesn't happen more often!

[Steven Torres]

Neil,
I think Sandra is right though, that no one does original artwork for covers anymore (though I think HARD CASE does). There wouldn't need to be any checking at all if the artwork were done fresh.

[Ingrid (I.J.Parker)]

I am very lucky in that Penguin found an artist who draws and paints the images for my books, (usually two per title to let us select -- yes, I'm consulted) and who does an absolutely superb job -- so much so that his cover designs made it into the New York Times before my books did. His name is Julius Ohta, and I think he'll be a huge success.

[Sarah]

"It's not as if publishers
possess vast archives of all the book jackets ever used"

Well, in the age of all things digital, could this be a realistic possibility? Lord knows there's enough talk of digitizing text and having proprietary control, so wouldn't it make even some sense for a digital design archivist to come aboard and scan every known cover used by a house? Granted, this is up there in the eyes-bleeding category as data entry, and it wouldn't solve the cross-publisher cover problem highlighted above, but at least it's doable in theory.

In practice, Neil, you're right, and this debate's about as practical as last year's endless ink spilled about fact-checking post-Frey.

[Sandra Ruttan]

John Rickards' last book, The Darkness Inside was delayed several months - Sarah would likely know better than me, but I think about a year - because they couldn't come up with a cover. And then they came up with a cover that the publisher used for another book, and the books were handled by the same editor within a year of each other. (http://www.johnrickards.com/archives/2007/06/12/oh-come-on/)

While I can appreciate the challenges of dealing with covers and trying to keep track of how images are being used, in house design should put a flag on an image used and take it out of circulation for a designated period of time, say two to four years ideally.

I realize this is a lot of extra work for publishers. However, I also see this as benefiting them. There are a number of readers who are impulse shoppers and they will look at a book and determine whether or not to pick it up and read more based on the cover, if it's turned out or displayed. If the person has already bought one book with the cover, seeing a second book with a variation of the same cover could cause confusion and deter sales. I've seen people complain over purchasing the same book from a series for a second time because the cover had been changed, which is proof to me that there's a certain percentage of the market that considers visual cues when shopping.

[Sandra Ruttan]

** My mistake - the cover for The Touch of Ghosts was duplicated, and I said The Darkness Inside. Of course I noticed as soon as I posted.

[Charles Ardai]

For the record (and not to toot our own horn), yes, Hard Case Crime does commission an original painting for every book it publishes.

[John Rickards]

Duplication wouldn't be such an issue if publishers more frequently did reasonably major tweaks to existing graphics - Kevin Wignall's next cover is a case in point. It's less hassle and, I would guess, less money than commissioning a fresh cover for every book but would at least ensure a smaller scale of duplication than just the raw stock photo.

And outside crime there seems to be far less of this sort of thing. The general/lit fiction section of my local bookstore seems to have far more "small drawn art plus text" or "clever colour mixing plus text" design work. Crime does seem to fall into the "moody landscape photo plus title" thing too often for my money.

Not that it's universal - HC UK seem to be doing a very good job at present with their crime crowd of following a kind of publisher style of cover, where a single, relatively small, clear graphic gets blended with a white-cream background (see Stuart MacBride, Michael Marshall's THE INTRUDERS, Alex Barclay et al.). It's not much, but it shows more actual thought and planning, I think, than the alternative.

[Kevin Wignall]

John raises an interesting point - is it just certain publishers who don't invest time and imagination in covers?

Simon & Schuster have actually been very good at what John mentions - for example, for my first, a stock picture of a bullet but with the title "People Die" engraved along the side of it. Likewise, with the new one, almost certainly a stock photo but modified to make it unique.

And again, as John says, what does it say about publishers and respect for genre that literary titles have more effort invested into their covers?

[Jennifer Jordan]

Does it seem that beautiful, clever covers are the domain of the independent publisher and the big money making machines mass produce boring stock photos that, in America, border on garish?

And if crime fiction is the red-headed step-child of fiction, I will stay on the fringes and soak myself in darkness, thank you.

[Tess Gerritsen]

And to think only romance novels used to get ridiculed for having the same covers.