I do hope you’re not getting bored about book covers. My essay last week didn’t get nearly the attention that was given to Anna Legat’s views on cover design back in May but maybe it was me rather than the subject matter. Let’s hope so, because this week with have Gilli Allan with her take on covers.
Book Covers are an Art in Themselves – A subjective view
There is only one book I recall buying because of its cover. I was twenty and browsing in Menzies, on the Strand in London. Black with a pale gaunt face looking out, the cover remains a strong visual memory. (Inexplicably I can find no trace of it online!) Intrigued, and entirely at a loss which name – Titus Groan or Mervyn Peake – was the title and which the author, I picked it up from the shelf. I’m not a fan of fantasy, but Mervyn Peake’s masterpiece, the Gormenghast trilogy, became an obsession and remains one of the stand-out literary experiences of my life.
Covers can be misleading, though. As a young woman I can easily recall my outrage when a novel adorned with a pretty blonde in a crinoline, turned out to be a Regency tale of a dark-haired heroine. Or worse, when the hero proved to be a bearded redhead, but the handsome chap on the cover had been dark and clean shaven. It was just WRONG!
Now I never choose a book because of its cover. Which isn’t to say I don’t judge. There are covers I like and covers I definitely don’t. Those that make me pause and look twice are covers whose message is unclear. Anything enigmatic or atmospheric, or quirkily symbolic, or dominated by particularly magnetic colours, is far more likely to catch my eye. Will that be sufficient to make me buy? No. I have reached an age when I only read what I know I will like!
Am I lazy? Prejudiced? Intellectually unadventurous? Blinkered? Maybe all those things. I pick my reading from a list of authors I already admire, or from reviews on Arts programmes and newspapers, from word of mouth and from award-winners in favourite genres. I don’t even read blurbs because I prefer to be surprised! I certainly pay no attention to the covers.
My all-consuming hobby as a teenager was writing, but I would not show my soppy ramblings to anyone other than the two friends I insisted listened to my stories. Art was my best subject at school, and though English came second in enjoyment, my returned homework rarely received more than a B and the quantity of red scribbled corrections convinced me I was no good.
I stopped writing when I went to art school. It was only after a career of more than ten years as an illustrator in advertising that I decided to try writing again. This was not in response to a sudden creative flowering. After becoming a mother, I didn’t want to return to the hassle and stress of work! Writing proved to be an occupation I could easily fit around being a stay-at-home-mum. The biggest bonus of that decision was the joy I discovered in revisiting my “soppy” hobby.
My first two novels swiftly found a publisher. The pre-digital Love Stories – characterized at the time as “The thinking woman’s Mills & Boon” – was a new enterprise, only too willing to take me up on my grandiose offer to provide the cover artwork. Though I knew precisely nothing about the discipline, I was undaunted. I came up with an illustrative water-colour image for both the covers of Just Before Dawn and Desires and Dreams.
From that high-point my expectations of a glittering career began a slide into a long and humbling period of lesson-learning. Whether or not my covers bear any responsibility for my poor sales is unknowable, but Love Stories did not prosper and when they went out of business, I failed to find another publisher.
Perhaps I should have taught myself book cover design in those in-between years, but commercial art and design had moved away from the tools I was familiar with to computers. It was only when the digital revolution came for books as well as art, that I decided to self-publish the three novels I’d written in the interim. With a lot of trial and error, I managed to produce cover designs I was happy reflected the content of the books. But the demands of constant marketing and promotion was a burden. When the opportunity arose to join the small publisher, Accent Press, I happily sold myself.
For the first time I confronted the reality of my covers being out of my control. I leave it to you to guess whether I was pleased with the covers I was given. TORN – about a woman living in a small end-of-terrace cottage on the side of a wooded hill. FLY or FALL – about a woman living a suburban life in a suburban town. LIFE CLASS – designed using a stock image I found – is the only one of my Accent Press covers that I actually feel reflects the story.
On deciding to self-publish my next book, I was again faced with the “cover” dilemma. Unable to find suitable stock images, I came up with a graphic design which was symbolic of the themes of my book. (It’s the picture at the top of this piece.) Though based on archaeology, Buried Treasure is a story about much more than digging up valuable objects. But I was never entirely satisfied and after publication almost immediately set about the task of redesigning its cover so that I could have a mini relaunch when the book went into paperback. I eventually managed to create a cover I was thrilled with but everyone in the business awarded it a thumbs-down. It looked less like a book about relationships (with a hint of mystery), and more like a thriller, apparently!
Back to the drawing board. Only this time it wasn’t my drawing board. I decided to accept the advice I was being given from all sides. Just because I am not much influenced by cover design when I make a choice to buy, I can’t deny the evidence that a majority are. Good cover design is not just the ability to assemble a pleasing image alongside the necessary information. It is a skill that has more to do with advertising, with identifying a brand and selling a product, than it does with “Art”. Though I did work in advertising, I was more of a workhorse than a visualizer or salesman. My ability to identify my buyer and hone my message to appeal to him or her is zero. By handing the project over to a professional, Cathy Helms of Avalon Graphics, I hope this time, I have got it right.
GILLI ALLAN
Living in Gloucestershire with her husband Geoff, Gilli is still a keen artist. She draws and paints and has now moved into book illustration.
All of her recent books Torn, Life Class, Fly or Fall, and Buried Treasure have gained ‘Chill with a Book’ awards.
Following in the family tradition, her son, historian Thomas Williams, is now also a writer.
Jane thinks he sees her as shallow and ill-educated. Theo thinks she sees him as a snob, stuffy and out of touch. Within the ancient precincts of the university the first encounter between the conference planner and the academic is accidental and unpromising. Just as well there’s no reason for them ever to meet again. But behind the armour they’ve each constructed from old scars, they’ve more in common than divides them. Both have an archaeological puzzle they are driven to solve. As their stories intertwine, their quest to uncover the past unearths more than expected.
Book covers seem to have become something of a theme here recently with lots of authors, like me, launching new copies of their books and suddenly developing a fascination with cover design. I thought that this week I’d have a look at the modern development of book covers, thus neatly combining the sudden enthusiasm for looking at covers and the historical theme of my blog. That’s my excuse anyway. Mostly it’s really an excuse to show some pretty pictures of books.
From ornament to marketing tool
Books, they say, do furnish a room.
Once those books would have been fine leather-bound volumes, the embossed trim and the gilded titles complementing the dark mahogany of the bookcase.
Time passed and leather bindings became a thing of the past. Now books were more utilitarian, with card covers. These covers were no longer decorative and not necessarily protected in glassed bookcases. So we got the dustjacket, a paper cover that guarded the card cover from damage. These could be quite plain. This is a comparatively decorative one.
When paperback books became more popular they originally had the same relatively plain covers as the dust jackets. Penguin famously changed all that with the introduction of brilliantly coloured covers, the different colours originally being linked to different types of content – yellow for psychological novels, green for crime, dark blue for biography, cerise for adventure, red for plays and in this case orange for fiction. The covers originally had a grid design with the title and the penguin logo like this:
Gradually, though, more illustrations were introduced.
Paperback design became an art in itself, both decorative and part of the business of selling the books. Book covers became a practical sales tool as well as, in a return to the days of leather bound volumes, a decorative element. Books once again came to furnish a room. In fact, there are companies that will supply books purely as decorative items, such as booksbythefoot.com whose website features this example of book covers as ornament.
Booksbythefoot.com is concerned only with the spines of the books, but the covers can be works of art. Dust covers have followed the design lead of paperbacks and, especially on large “coffee-table” books they can incorporate beautiful images.
The artwork on paperbacks has become increasingly elaborate, but at the same time often quite formulaic, with different types of cover clearly representing different genres. Here are a couple of non-genre (“literary”) covers.
Interestingly, The Last Days of Leda Grey was given a much more genre specific “romance” cover when it was released for mass-market publication.
The most elaborate and striking covers, unsurprisingly, are often those of graphic novels where cover designs can be so significant that the books often include an appendix with additional covers, some of which are spectacular images in their own right.
This can even lead to the rather strange situation where a hardback cover has a dramatic decorative image which is then protected by a dust cover with another startling image. By now any functional, marketing, rationale for the cover is consumed in the effort to produce a book which is in itself ornamental in appearance so we’re back to the idea that the covers are mainly there to furnish a room.
Book covers are practical in that they keep the books from falling apart. These early 19th century volumes are bound copies of separate plays, all protected by being placed in “proper” covers.
They are, however, also ornamental. The tooled spine and gilded title go beyond anything that is strictly required to protect the pages.
In time the ornamental aspects came to serve a double function – aesthetically pleasing but also selling (sometimes aggressively selling) the book. Here we see books that represent historical, romance, and action/adventure genres. All are reasonably typical (though the James Bond design is a little dated). All are aiming to be reasonably decorative, but this is subordinated to the selling message.
When I came to commission new covers for my ‘James Burke’ series, the designer used a typeface and layout that is generally recognised by potential buyers as fitting the ‘historical fiction’ genre.
Compare this with the work the same designer did for my one non-historical novel – a supernatural contemporary story.
The images and font could hardly be more different.
Are these covers more use or more ornament? Obviously they are designed to sell the books, but it is doubtful that the additional sales of an e-book priced at under £3.00 will cover the significant cost of the cover. But to me, like many authors, the cover is the face that my baby shows to the world, and I want my baby to be as pretty as possible. The cover is practical, certainly, but it is also a thing of beauty – an ornament to any bookcase.
A word from our sponsor
The two James Burke covers are from books that are being relaunched ahead of the publication of two new stories in the James Burke series later this year. They will very soon be joined by the third story featuring James Burke, Burke at Waterloo.
Dark Magic was published last October and is a departure for me. It’s comedy horror and Amazon reviews suggest that it makes people laugh and shiver. It was huge fun to write and lots of people seem to think it’s fun to read. It’s just £1.99 and you can buy it here: mybook.to/DarkMagic.
Rumours are flying that the French have plans to invade Egypt. But then rumours about French plans are two a penny. Still, the War Office considers that there is no harm in sending James Burke to Egypt to see if he can discover any French plots.
In Burke’s opinion, the exercise is a waste of time, but it could prove entertaining, and maybe even profitable if he can combine it with a little light tomb robbing. The mission seems even more attractive when he rescues a Spanish girl, Bernadita, who is being held as a slave in Cairo.
Burke is forced to take things more seriously when he discovers French agents already in Egypt, spying out the country ahead of Napoleon’s invasion. And when 35,000 French soldiers land, he finds himself organising guerrilla resistance – while also trying to protect Bernadita in a country now at war.
Can he frustrate French plans and get Bernadita safely out of country? And are the pigeons he had to carry to Alexandria going to be any help at all?
Burke’s adventures here are fictitious, but Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign was definitely real and we get a spy’s eye view of the French landing, the Battle of the Pyramids and Nelson’s decisive action at the Battle of the Nile.
Did a British spy play a decisive role in Nelson’s victory? Quite possibly. This is a modern spy story but the historical background is detailed and authentic. In the end, though, this is “a rattling good yarn”. Just relax and enjoy it.
The story is told in a laconic style, broadly following the report that Burke might make to his superiors, but including rather more personal detail than they would care about. This style gives the impression of a personal diary, and also conveys something of Burke’s personality. For example, we follow the personal struggles of an early 19th century soldier trying to overcome his sense of proper dress in order to blend in to the crowds.
====================== “If the French are looking for a European, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to dress as an Arab?” Burke had shed his tailcoat in preparation for his journey and was, once again, wearing the wrapping gown which had become his usual attire whilst riding in the desert. “How much more ridiculous would you have me look?” Bin Alim glanced pointedly at Burke’s breeches and boots, clearly visible below the gown. “How much more ridiculous could you look?” ======================
Burke and the Bedouin is now available on Kindle for just £2.99 (mybook.to/Bedouin). This edition is now available in North America with the same cover, so wherever you live you can buy it. Please do so.
So here it is! The cover for the rerelease of Burke and the Bedouin.
I’m really excited about this cover – the latest for me by Dave Slaney. And I’m delighted that people have already been tweeting to say they’re looking forward to seeing it. I hope they like it as much as I do.
The Eyes Have It
Some people were not overenthusiastic about this design because it features eyes. In the dim and distant past there was a sort of rule that you didn’t put eyes on book covers because they could be seen as rather threatening. Then somebody realised that humans are hard-wired to notice eyes so covers with eyes on them get a disproportionate amount of attention. They are (and I’ve tried so hard to avoid this phrase) more eye-catching. People may find them mildly disturbing but they do notice them and that’s the important thing. The result was a zillions of covers with eyes on. So many that there is even a Pinterest pin for ‘Eyes on the cover’ (and thanks to Amanda Merlos for putting that together).
Just some of the eyes on Amanda Merlos’ Pinterest pin
The result of this deluge of eyes was a reaction against eyes on covers, even though some original cover designs featuring eyes were critical as well as commercial successes. For example, the Smithsonian Magazine singles out Francis Cugat’s cover design for The Great Gatsby as “one of the more prominent literary symbols in American literature”.
I was tempted to have eyes as the unifying theme for all the covers on the Burke series, but it really didn’t work out. We went for maps in the end (a suggestion I first made to Accent, who were Burke’s original publisher and whose cover designs I thought were very impressive). Burke and the Bedouin was the only one that ended up with eyes. It’s a striking design and I hope you like it.
What’s inside the cover?
I’m relaunching Burke and the Bedouin as I spruce up the first three Burke books ahead of two new ones coming out later this year. (I wrote more about this earlier this week, so I won’t go into that again.) Burke and the Bedouin was the second book about James Burke and it was written purely as an entertainment. While Burke in the Land of Silver made a gentle nod towards the problems that arise when you send an army to ‘liberate’ people from their own government (Iraq was fresh in my mind while I was writing), there is no sub-text at all to Burke and the Bedouin. It’s designed purely as entertainment and, although the history (Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the defeat of his navy at the Battle of the Nile) is solidly factual, Burke’s adventures are total fantasy. There is a beautiful girl to be rescued, dastardly French spies to be defeated, and even a treasure to be found. Despite the bloodshed (and there’s a fair bit of that), it’s essentially fun. (One of my favourite Amazon reviews says, “In spite of the violence the book has a light air to it.”) It must have done something right: my royalty statements suggest it was the most commercially successful of the three Burke books.
Preparing this book for re-publication meant reading it for the first time since it was originally published in 2014. Re-reading old books can be a nightmare for a writer, but I must admit that I really enjoyed it. I had forgotten an awful lot of the plot and I was caught up in Burke’s adventures, trying to remember what happened next. And, though it’s always dangerous to admit to finding your own work amusing, I did enjoy passages like this, where the ever-reliable William Brown is summing up Burke’s plan to collect information from some French spies he has discovered:
‘So we meet up with our Arab friends, raid the camp, truss up the Froggies, have a nice little chat with them, and then head home.’
‘You have, as ever, William, summed up the situation in a nutshell. You should have been an officer.’
‘It’s the book learning, sir. I’m more a hit-them-in-the-goolies-and-run-away kind of bloke. I rely on officers like you to write it all up nice afterwards.’
Publication date
Burke and the Bedouinis now available in the same edition (with the same cover) in both the UK and North America (and, indeed, everywhere else). It’s being published on Kindle next Tuesday (14 July) with the paperback along soon after. You can pre-order the e-book now for £2.99: mybook.to/Bedouin.
I hope that by now you’ve noticed that Burke in the Land of Silver was republished in the middle of last month. If you haven’t already read it, please do. You can buy it on Kindle for just £2.99 or read it free on Kindle Unlimited. And it’s also available in paperback.
It’s got a shiny new cover but, apart from one word that was a terrible mistype, and, I think, a comma somewhere, it’s exactly the same as the edition published by Endeavour (now Lume Books) only a couple of years ago. So why the change?
Part of the reason is in the words “now Lume Books”. Endeavour didn’t do a bad job with my books and I hope Lume Books can do a good job in future. That’s why my books about John Williamson are still with them. But the upheavals that seemed to convulse so many small presses at the moment can lead to them taking their eyes off the ball and the results of that are potentially bad news for authors. In this rapidly-changing publishing environment, many writers feel safer if their babies are under their own control.
The John Williamson series is still published by Lume Books
This is particularly important for me right now. I’ve written two more books about James Burke since the original publication of Burke at Waterloo back in 2015 to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle and I’ve been waiting for the right time to publish them. I’ve decided that the right time is now. (This is partly because I’ve just resolved some rights issues that emphatically weren’t Endeavour’s fault but which have made me realise how vulnerable writers are once they’ve signed a publishing contract.) Both of these new books are now planned to come out later this year. But it’s a simple truth about publishing that if you have a series of books, they are best sold as a series with a consistent look and consistent marketing.
By taking control of my books again I have been able to produce covers that reflect the values I try to put into my writing and which are consistent across the whole series. I’ve probably spent rather more money on them than a publisher would have, because the books are naturally more important to me as the writer than they are to the publisher. I have to admit, too, that cost effectiveness wasn’t the first thing I looked for in cover design: it was covers that I could be personally very proud of. (And huge thanks to Dave Slaney for his wonderful interpretation of my somewhat garbled brief.)
The first three books are coming out with barely a month between them because the relaunch is mainly there to prepare the way for the two new ones. The second, Burke and the Bedouin will be published a week from today, just a month after the first. Like Burke in the Land of Silver, it has just one word changed and a few tweaks to punctuation. And, like Burke in the Land of Silver, it has a beautiful new cover by Dave Slaney. The cover reveal is this Friday. Call back then so that you can admire it.
