The Word Cloud

Very nice site this for fans of design, but especially for anyone thinking about book covers or wondering why their last book ended up selling fewer copies than the 1954 edition of Railway Maintenance Sheds in Oxfordshire.

Some beautiful covers and some thought-provoking views. Let us know your thoughts.

http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com/

Stupid question but what do people do when they want a book cover? Do they design themselves?

Oh Ok it was a stupid question. Have just looked at the site.

I hear tell, but unable to confirm (libel lawyers begone) that it is rumoured that W H Smith may chose which books to stock, on the basis of the cover alone (sobs quietly in corner).

WHS won't actually judge a book by cover alone, but the cover is astonishingly important and writers get no real input into the design. (They have a right to be 'consulted', but since they don't have a veto right that consultation right is pretty meaningless.) It's also true that the WHS buyers can't read every book they choose to stock so, yes, covers do matter a ludicrous amount. My 2nd book sold 1/2 the number of copies that my first book did, even though it had very good promotion in key stores, mostly because the book cover was terrible. I wasn't a very happy bunny. INdeed, I wasn't even a bunny.

Yes, editors would rather you liked your cover, but even the contractual right to be consulted is fairly new. But there's very little you can do if you hate it. They're notorious for causing trouble, some of which I think is because we resist having our novels summarised, only of course that's what a cover has to do - say what the book is to someone who isn't even near enough to read the author's name. The real problems arise when what the book's cover says is radically different from what the author thinks it is, and/or different from what the book really is, which may not be the same thing.

If Tesco want to sell a book, they may well say, 'But we can't in that cover.' Since if they do buy it it might be tens of thousands of copies, which also increases the print run to make sales of all copies more profitable because the unit cost comes down, it would be a very odd publisher who said, 'We don't care about Tesco, we'll stick to the cover.'

My last novel would have been called 'The Russian Lieutenant' except that a big book club group said they couldn't sell the word 'Russian' so the title got changed to 'The Lieutenant's Lover'. I didn't much like either title, as it happens, but it was a nice cover.

I have been following the blog of Henry Sene Yee, who is a professional book cover design artist. This shows how they first decide the concept and then how the cover evolves.

I designed my own covers using Gimp. You can download it for free. It took a long time to figure out how to use it though. I pulled my hair out several times, but I finally have a cover I can live with. If you want to see it you can go to: http://kasi-kcblake.blogspot.com Or you can go to the Vampires Rule group here and take a look.