In a discussion of cover art recently, I recalled what I had been taught early on by an editor. She had sent me three color cartoons -- that's a technical term as it is used here -- of possible cover art for a novel I'd sold her. I rated them 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and naturally, she went with my least favorite.
I liked the other two illustrations better. So, she said, did she -- but, they weren't better book covers, they were just better as stand-along art pieces. By the time the title and my name and a teaser were slugged in, the better art covers would look worse, and she was right.
What a book cover is supposed to do is get somebody with money in his pocket to pick up the novel, and, made curious by the cover, open it. After which, it is the writer's job to get them to read enough of the first page to get hooked into buying it.
End of cover function.
That's it. If the cover has anything to do with the book that's good, but not absolutely necessary. I've had great covers with dynamic montage scenes on them, full-wraps, none of which show up in the novel anywhere. Best cover for my money is the one for The Musashi Flex, because it shows exactly what I asked for, and what you see is what you get.
The one atop this column is for my first published novel, The Tularemia Gambit. (A book, by the way, whose title broke two of the first rules for titles -- 1. Never use a name hardly anybody will know the meaning of; and, 2) Never use a name most people can't pronounce.
But the cover, while technically not all that well-rendered, did tell the reader both generally and specifically what s/he would be getting into. The chessboard, the pieces, the different levels. The concept was, I thought, brilliant.
While I'm always happier to get a cover I think is the bomb and well-drawn and designed, all it needs to do is get potential readers to pick up the book and open it. I used to joke that if they wanted to put Conan in a tutu on the cover, that'd be fine by me ...
So now you know about covers ...
Seems to me SF/fantasy cover art has improved significantly since I started reading books. A lot less cheese and cheesecake, a lot more artists who seem to have actually read the book.
ReplyDeleteOverall, I think this is true.
ReplyDeleteSometimes the artists will just read the first few pages, or a chapter in the middle. Sometimes, they get it from the outline and never read the book at all.
Sometimes, your editor will ask you to point out page(s) where you describe a character, and they'll use that.
Were I an artist, I think I'd want to read the whole book, sift it, and come up with something that caught the essence of the story in a single illo, but that isn't necessary. One of my Conan covers was done years before I wrote the novel, it was a generic, in-stock thing, with Conan, a monster, and a half-nekkid woman. Since that was pretty much the default cover for all of the Conan paperbacks when I was working in that universe, it served well enough. I thought those covers were better when the artist read enough to describe a monster I actually *used,* but it didn't seem to make any difference to the sales ...
That's one of the core principles of marketing (which is what cover art is), 'Never let reality get in the way of a good story.'
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah. A story can be absolutely true and nobody will believe it. It can be as big a tall tale as Paul Bunyan's big blue ox, Babe, and people will nod and accept it -- if the teller can tell it properly.
ReplyDeleteJust as you should never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, you also can't use truth as a defense in fiction. It doesn't have to *be* true, it has to *sound* true ...
Harlan tells a story about the guy who went to visit the queen of England. Guy had a drafty attic, and decided to go have a chat with Her Majesty. He climbed a wall, sauntered across the grounds, walked through a normally locked and guarded door into the castle, ambled down the hall to her bedroom, went in, sat down the foot of her bed and started talking to Her Majesty. She pushed her alarm button for help, but nobody came.
ReplyDeleteAt every step of his visit where someone should have seen and stopped him, though a series of unbelievable coincidences, nobody did. Guard went to to pee, door was left unlocked, people saw him but assumed he belonged there, the Queen's alarm buzzer went out.
Eventually somebody passing by saw him, Her Majesty made some polite noise and he was collared. He was harmless, but apparently charmed.
But when you tell it like it happened, nobody believes it. Come on -- waaay too coincidental, gimme a break. If you wrote it that way in a fiction story, your editor would reject it, even though it was absolutely true ...
Heard about Granite Shadow?
ReplyDeleteGoogle it and read... be horrified. that's a real tularemia gambit. Gotta love W.
Old news, weaponized-Tularemia. The U.S. government has been screwing around with this kind of stuff forever.
ReplyDeleteTularemia, for those who don't know, aka rabbit-fever, is a first cousin to bubonic plague.
In the 1950's, the Navy conducted tests in San Francisco. They released a "harmless" bacterium into the air, to check the wnd patterns -- ostensibly to prepare for a Russian gas or bioweapon attack.
The bacterium in question was harmless -- if you were healthy. If, however, you had a compromised immune system, due to illness or injury, it could be an opportunistic pathogen.
All of a sudden, a bunch of post-op or seriously sick folks developed this esoteric infection, and a lot of them died. The numbers weren't huge, and nobody was keeping overall track very well back then, but the Navy buried it in top-secret ratings.
It was thirty-odd years later that people digging via the FOI act came across declassified documents and sussed the story out. Too late for the families to sue, even if they could have nailed it down for sure.
At one point, I was working on a novel with this as a set-up -- people started having heart-attacks, and a doctor noticed a pattern -- they all had cardiac valve infections secondary to an esoteric pathogen that lay dormant in the tissue for years.
The doc and a CDC investigator back-tracked it to a naval experiment -- on the east coast this time.
The book, which I never finished, started out with a pilot of a company jet leaving New York City who had a heart attack and flew the corporate Gulf Stream into the Statue of Liberty.
I never got back to that one ...
Are you aware that granite shadow had to do with the spraying of a tularemia simulant over an antiwar demonstration? Several people took ill from it. As I recall the reason for the name is because it took place on the Washington Monument "mall."
ReplyDeleteWhat next, glanders?