Cover Design - 20th July 2010

One of my Facebook friends, thank you Ann, suggested a topic to write about today – cover artwork. Boy, has she picked a topic and a half. I could probably start a new blog just on that subject. NO not happening! I will return to this theme from time to time.

As many of you will know from working with me in the past, I have been developing cover artwork for a long time, producing dozens of covers for my previous, and unlamented, publisher before moving on to producing a large number of the covers for our own company.
Producing cover art is very therapeutic, and fulfils a basic creative need, but it does have its frustrations. Most of those frustrations centre on authors who don’t understand the process and more importantly the limitations of the process.

Let me try to expand on that as a theme, but it might need several posts, see what I mean! When we are writing we usually have a very clear idea of what our characters actually look like. Sometimes we describe them in detail, sometimes not. The level of detail, dependant more on the author’s style and aims than on genre and length of the piece. Some authors deliberately only give a vague glimpse of the character, in order to allow the reader to imagine themselves in the situation themselves. Such transference works very well, especially in a certain genre! LOL Even so, we may carry that detailed image in our mind, even if it doesn’t actually reach the paper.

Not only do these authors fixate on the look of their main characters but also have a strong idea of how their cover should be laid out. This is where the frustrations start to emerge. We have a vested interest in making sure the cover will help sell the book. The author’s first concept may not produce a saleable cover. The other side to the equation is the budget.

We are a small press publisher, we can’t go call all the top model agencies to find the right model, have a full casting call, with the author present, to select the right person, and then shop for the right outfit before flying halfway across the world to shoot them against a sunset at the Sydney Opera House. How I wish I had that kind of expense allowance! Nor can we afford to commission original artwork, digital or otherwise, for fantasy pieces.

As a result, we have to work from a photo stock library, and if the author is lucky we might find the pretty blonde with a bob, slightly overweight, with a crescent shaped birthmark on her right cheek, wearing a nice pink taffeta dress, looking apprehensive but not scared. We might also be able to find that sunset picture over the Opera House too, and by the wizardry that is Photoshop be able to overlay and merge the two pictures together. Let’s not even start to talk about lighting, lighting vectors, and all the inherent problems with such a process, which the author takes for granted. That is, provided they can see it might happen in the first place. That suspension of disbelief becomes second nature by the time you’re onto your third cover, but not on your first.

As I say, a source of frustrations, on both sides, not just on mine. Since this also happens early in the process, it has endless possibilities for issues to arise.

I might add, the bigger the publisher, the less input the author is likely to have on the cover design, until you reach the real stratospheric heights.

I’ll return to this theme in another post.