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Hey all,
Just wanted to show you the cover for my book – I can’t post pictures here, but this link takes you to a wee blogpost. I witter a bit about it there, but you can ignore that and just admire the foxyness of the art. Daniele has done covers for the likes of Stephen King and lots more, so to have him do my art is pretty awesome. 🙂 It’s quite emotional seeing it as an actual cover – it’s another step towards it becoming reality I suppose. Actual physical proofs have got to wait till June ish, so until then I’ve got to be satisfied with staring at pictures…
Cover Reveal for This Is Our Undoing
I gushed all over this on social media and have only just seen it here – so congratulations on a thing of beauty (autocorrect tried to make that a ‘biting of beauty’, and perhaps I should have let it), which is quite perfect. xx
It is an excellent fox. Foxes are cool.
I think I understand really well why you wouldn’t want a human face on the cover. A huge part of the pleasure of reading a novel, is the way the characters reveal themselves to us as the story progresses. A picture of somebody, fully-formed, denies the reader that pleasure. But you can understand why publishers want to do it sometimes. Where there is a clear audience (market) it promises ‘buy this. You won’t be disappointed’. Nothing says bodice-ripper like a picture of a laydee wearing a suitably rippable bodice. And I think my personal dislike of faces on covers, particularly photographs or realist images, has something to do with this. I feel I’m being steered towards something, whereas I want to at least believe I’m doing the driving.
Your cover is absolutely fab.
Yes, my thoughts exactly @athelstone. I did the same thing – I specifically asked my publisher to brief the designer to NOT include illustrations of the characters, for precisely the reasons you say. I wanted the kids to have ownership of them. Silhouettes are fine, but not drawings. Funny how we all feel the same about this!
I suppose that once a book and an author become so well known that the text will survive whatever the publisher throws at it, things are different. The various covers for Mrs Dalloway were what I thought of straight away. They is almost always a portrait of a woman, often Woolf herself, but there are few that would positively prevent a purchase. One or two are ridiculously tacky, this for example, and, given a choice, I would opt for another.
This is a fabulous cover @raine Classy and enticing.
Apologies, I thought I’d replied when I first saw it but obviously I hadn’t 🙁
That’s not the worst Wordsworth Classics cover, sadly https://www.amazon.co.uk/Middlemarch-Wordsworth-Classics-George-Eliot/dp/1853262374/
@Daedalus, that’s so unutterably awful it’s tipped all the way over into wonderful!
@libby, @athelstone, thank you. I’m delighted with my foxy. 🙂I think you’re right in that figures are often used as a massive ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS BOOK IS’ flag, like for bodice rippers or YA urban romantic fantasy, or twee historical rags-to-riches stories. So they can work wonders as a marketing tool. But … I really don’t think they would have worked for mine. Maybe also, and maybe I’m overanalysing here, when the figure is the main feature of the cover, it is saying ‘this book is about this character’, where-as I’d like to think that my book is about more than the characters. Just as I’d say that @kazg’s book is about far more than just her main character’s story, so having the silhouette on that cover works because she is a figure within an intriguing snapshot of a world, rather than THE feature of the cover.
With crime fiction, it seems that the ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS IS signifier is a silhouetted man walking down a tunnel or over a bridge or along a lonely road BUT IT IS ALWAYS THE SAME BLINKING MAN!!! and I wonder authors don’t put their foot down. Even more so when I see what can be done by a small company with ‘This is our undoing’
Publishers vary a lot in terms of the extent they will consult and take account of author suggestions. Mine have ranged from asking me for examples of covers I like and making changes to the design at my behest, to not even showing me the cover until the book is published. In the middle was making some changes to a first iteration, showing a second for consultation – and then admitting that the second version had already been finalised and they were just hoping I liked it.
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