Category: writing

The Genesis of a Book Cover

Sometimes you look at something that was fine the day before, and then realise that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t as fine as you first thought. This turns out to be the case with my second novel, Leonard Bliss & the Accountant of the Apocalypse. I’m happy with the book and I’m happy with the cover… but I wasn’t sure that the cover really reflected what the book was about.

20130312-131845.jpgAt it’s heart, Leonard is a comedy, a little dark in some places, a little weird in others, but a comedy nonetheless, and so it needed a cover that was less severe; something a little more whimsical but just as striking as the original. So where do I start?

Well, the cover should also tell the story in my opinion, or at least part of the story. And a story is  about the characters, so I knew that I wanted at least one of the players to feature on the cover. I chose Magdelena because, contrary to the title, the story is really about her and her life (if you can call it that) as the most senior female executive in the HereAfter.

I made another couple of odd choices fairly early on in the process: I wanted the cover to be a completely original piece of work – no stock photos, no composites. And I also wanted it to be a painting. Somewhere between being a prostitute at the time of Christ and  becoming the CEO of Purgatory, Magdelena was an artist, and so  I wanted a book cover that she herself might have painted.

Okay, this is all starting to sound a little bit odd, so let’s get back to something a little more down to earth: the internet; that’s where any search for a cover artist starts these days. Type ‘book cover artist’ into Google, and you will find yourself snowed under a mountain of search results, galleries and site links.  But from a pretty daunting list,  I found I could usually discard most cover artists simply because I didn’t like the website. I binned the next round because they were quite specific to a particular genre, which my book doesn’t really fit into.

So a few days trawling the web, and reading recommendations from a fair number of eBook sites, led me Scribbleleaf, a small outfit (two women, I think) who specialise in  book covers crafted by hand.

And this is where the hard work started, not for me; for Janet who accepted the challenge of painting a new cover for my book.

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Now, this sort of design is hard work for both the author and the artist. You start off not knowing exactly what you’re looking for. Ideas are sketched out, discussed, discarded and the process begins again. There’s really no point in being a passenger in something like this; it’s your book so the foundation of an idea has to come from you.

The problem is that once an idea settles in your head, it quickly becomes frighteningly solid, and where once you only have a vague idea of what the cover should look like, now you have a photograph stamped inside your noggin that’s accurate down to the brushstroke. A good artist will understand this, and grit her teeth as you sweat the smallest detail: the position of the lion,   the fact that the telephone doesn’t have a keypad . . .

And it’s scary fun watching the picture take shape. I did wake up late one night, yelling, ‘EYE COLOUR!’

No problem; Janet was all over it. 🙂

Amazon vs The World

Came across Emma Clarke Lam’s excellent response  to Jonathan Franzen’s article published in the Guardian last month. Mr Franzen was complaining about…well, if I’m honest, I’m not really sure what Mr Franzen was complaining about (and let’s put this down to my phenomenally short attention span, rather than the article itself). From what little of it I understood, he seemed to be quite upset at how the nature of modern media consumption was endangering literary art.

That’s a guess, so don’t quote me on it.

The point where Ms Lam picked up the story was here:

In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels? As fewer and fewer readers are able to find their way, amid all the noise and disappointing books and phony reviews, to the work produced by the new generation of this kind of writer, Amazon is well on its way to making writers into the kind of prospectless workers whom its contractors employ in its warehouses, labouring harder for less and less, with no job security, because the warehouses are situated in places where they’re the only business hiring.

Yup, that’s quite a statement from Mr Franzen, and in some ways he’s right:  Just because you can self-publish something, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should. And let’s face it;  in the early days, the Amazon Kindle shop was a dark and horrible place. Authors were throwing in  dross that hadn’t been spell-checked, let alone edited. Groups were formed with the sole purpose of promotional circle-jerking (you review me – I review you). And then there were the emotional blackmailmarketing campaigns: ‘Buy my book and I will give half the money to starving children everywhere. C’mon! Buy it! Think of the children, damn you!’

Anyway, that was then. Amazon has cleaned up the shop, continues to chase down the shady review organisations and, on the whole, has done a great job of promoting the work of authors who, as Ms Lam says, would have books languishing on hard drives, unread. Are there poor quality books in the store? Of course there are, but there are poor quality books that are traditionally published too. Some of them started life as eBooks, and then, once the huge sales potential was realised, were picked up by publishers.

You see, the publishing houses have one thing in common with Amazon: when they see the dollar signs, any notions of being guardians of literary good taste  vanish out the window. And quite right too; I think Fifty Shades of Grey is the worst book I’ve ever laid eyes on. I also know the author has sold several million more books than me. So my opinion is just that: an opinion. Many authors regard Dan Brown as the red-headed stepchild of literary endeavour, and yet, despite their learned opinions, his books continue to be published and we, the uneducated, continue to buy them! Because that is the sole purpose of publishing houses: to produce books that people want to read, not to decide what people should and should not be reading.  The defenders of good taste are writing, aptly enough, in the Guardian.

Having said all that, I think it is dangerous for any one company to hold the keys to the kingdom, but as far as I can see, the publishing industry has done little to stop it.  Amazon (currently) offers greater renumeration to the author for every book sold. An author can have a book out as soon as its ready, rather than waiting a year or so for it to appear in a bookshop. In addition to that, the indie marketplace is fuelling spin-off  support industries such as editors, copy-editors, cover artists… And if the author still wants to go the printed book route then there is always CreateSpace.

While reading Ms Lam’s piece, something else struck me. The traditional publishing industry has been complaining, for a long time, that people are not reading as much as they used to; there’s far too much other cool stuff competing for our attention. This is true, so in the run-up to Christmas, which company is running adverts on every major channel, encouraging people to read more books?

Yes, it’s Amazon. Perhaps the old school should get its act together and do the same.