Today he talked about book covers. About how how they can make or break a novel.
Considering that I am in the middle of creating a book cover with my artist, I found his information quite interesting. Gave me new thoughts about the cover. I sent the article to my artist and am interested to see what he thinks about it.
I also recently talked to another self-published author who complained about his lack of sales. Let's just say his cover art was very basic and homemade looking. And I knew that he could benefit from something better, and I shared my opinion with him. Let's just say that he still hasn't taken that step.
So anyhow, I thought the newsletter very good, and I want to share it with you all. Especially look at the link he gives about Kris Rusch. If you like it, don't forget to subscribe to his newsletter so you can get it all the time.
David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—Judging a Book by its Cover
As you design your own electronic books, you’ll need to create some cover art. Many established authors discuss professional publishers as if their art departments are a godsend, and they can be. However, I’ve seen so much damage done to potential sales through poor cover art that I have to admit that I’m a bit leery of trusting the publishers.
Years ago, I had a friend whose novel was slated to be the first on a publisher’s list for the month. Then a big-name author submitted a finished book, and my friend got bumped to the number two slot. Now, I’d seen my friend’s cover—a beautifully illustrated piece that was likely to jump off the shelves. But when the book got released, guess what? The publisher had darkened the cover, making it dull and dingy. It didn’t sell. The publisher had actually gone so far as to SABOTAGE the author’s sales.
This got me to thinking, and I came to an ugly conclusion. Guess what? Unless you’re chosen to be the publisher’s major launch for the year, your work too will get a “second-rate” effort. To some degree, you’re likely to get sabotaged. I guarantee it.
The reason? The publishers have to advertise to their buyers, and a wonderful cover promises a wonderful book. So the very best, world’s greatest covers are designed for those special books that the publisher most wants to push. This is almost always the book of a big name author who already makes millions of sales—not the hopeful new author with his or her first offering. Even if a great cover does come in, the publisher may do as they did in the case that I mentioned—they darken the cover, use poor fonts, or in some other way make the book look second-rate so that their main title will stand out.
As a result, most covers, even the pretty good ones, are actually not the publisher’s BEST effort. As authors, we get used to this. When we put out a novel, we silently pray, “Please, don’t let this cover suck.” And so long as the cover is pretty good, we tend to be pleased.
Because of this practice, many authors who are now self-publishing are finding that they can actually create BETTER covers than they’ve ever gotten from their publishers.
Now every author who has written for a few years has probably been given a disappointing cover. I had it happen on my third novel. I knew that my editor wanted a certain scene, a night scene, and I said, “Go ahead and publish that scene, but make sure that it is shown in the daylight. The dark cover won’t work.”
Well, I got a night scene. Even though I very much liked the artist, the cover didn’t work. The novel got reviewed well, but the cover didn’t. In fact, I’ll show you a review, if you like. Note in this review by Orson Scott Card (from the Books to Look For column of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1993) how nearly as much time is spent talking about the dark cover as is spent talking about the novel itself:
“It's a shame when a powerful original work of science fiction is killed by the publisher's art department, but that's what is apparently happening with Dave Wolverton's third -- and best so far -- novel. Not that the cover art is bad. It's just dark and drab and there is nothing about the presentation to suggest that this is a special book.
“To which the obvious answer is that not all books can have "special" treatment. If every book published had embossed or cut-out covers or white backgrounds, or bold, clear art, then these techniques would become passé and nothing would stand out from the crowd.
“That makes sense, of course. I'm just baffled by the decision to make this book blend in with all the midlist and marginal books published at the same time. (The editor is already saying, "We don't publish any marginal books, and this cover is excellent." But editors have to say that; it helps even more if they mean it. But it doesn't change the fact that Path of the Hero has been made invisible on the shelves.)
“Special treatment costs more, and editors have to pick very carefully which ones to spend that extra effort on. I cannot fathom their choices, just as I have no clue why such seminal works as Ben Bova's Mars and Norman Spinrad's Russian Spring managed to make it through the award season without mention by the Nebula voters. Apparently somebody somewhere decides who's hot from month to month, and I can tell you, whoever it is doesn't consult with me.
“You want to know what I think is hot? How about a novel in which a writer takes a now-ancient science fiction motif -- the revival of Neanderthal man -- and makes something astonishingly powerful and fresh out of it? While Path of the Hero is as rip-snorting an adventure as you could hope to find -- a world at war, alliance of many sentient creatures coming together in a last-ditch effort to win their freedom from a slave-based empire, characters you know and care about finding love and meaning in the midst of death and chaos -- it is also a profoundly philosophical work.
“In Wolverton's world of Anee (previously visited in Serpent Catch, a prequel which you do not have to read in order to enjoy Path), terraformers from Earth created a vast zoo in which they restored the flora and fauna of the Jurassic, Miocene, and Pliocene on three separate continents. Several sentient and near-sentient species of proto-humans were included, and when the alien Eridani from another star system effectively ended all human starflight, these ancient people and Homo sapiens were forced to make the best of things on the surface of the Earth.
“Now, long after, two dangers face Anee. The slavers are making their final bid for world domination, wiping out the last strongholds of freedom; and the descendants of the original paleobiologists are now mindlessly setting out to destroy sentient life because it is endangering the environment. And the best hope of stopping both is a man named Tull, who is half human and half Neanderthal -- or, as they call themselves, Pwi.
“For me, what lifts this book out of the first rank of quest-adventures and onto another plane entirely is Wolverton's creation of the Pwi, a people who are as loving and spiritual as Homo sapiens is angry and rational. The Pwi have much greater strength, but also much more compassion, and in the process of this book we learn that the Neanderthals were not defeated in their contest with Homo sapiens. Rather they made a tactical decision, to bide their time until a future that could truly belong to them, the kind of world on which they could happily live. This book is about the struggle to make Anee that world.
“So if you want an extraordinary novel of ideas that coexist quite easily with a powerful story of adventure and character, go look among the bland bluish covers of midlist science fiction books, down near the bottom of the shelf of the last sf rack, where the works of Wolverton are alphabetically fated to reside. Pick up Path of the Hero. You won't soon forget this book.”
In this review, Orson Scott Card succinctly states the problems that publishers face. Sure, they could give us all special treatment, but then they’d have your novel competing against their own best-selling works! So the big fish get all of the publicity, and most of the rest of the authors get scraps.
Well, you can do better than that. Time after time I’ve seen authors design their own covers and come up with work that surpasses that of a professional art department.
Scott was right about the book mentioned above. It got killed. The publisher at the time, Bantam, had been bought out buy a large company that decided to trash the entire science fiction department. Previous books of mine had sold about 60,000 copies each. This book sold something like 16,000 copies.
(Note: I recently put the two books of this series—SERPENT CATCH and PATH OF THE HERO—up as a single e-book, and it should be available soon, if it hasn’t come online already. The two were conceived as one long book, but my publisher convinced me to put them in two. That’s another thing that I don’t recommend that you ever do. The second book in the series had what I considered to be a better title, but at the last minute my editor asked me to change it to something that I thought was bland. My thought at the time was, “Well, a bad title can’t kill a book.” But guess what, a bad title leads to a bland cover, and a the combination of those two—with the fact that the book was the second in a two-part series—turned out to be toxic.)
So what should you learn from Scott’s article? Don’t create bland covers.
There are a lot of ways to create bland covers. I’d suggest that you avoid night scenes. Avoid busy scenes, where there is too much happening in the background. Avoid scenes where the background and foreground have the same color scheme. Avoid “scenery” covers that don’t feature characters. Don’t create covers with too many characters, so that there is no central focus. In fact, there are so many “gotcha’s,” I can’t cover them all here.
In any case, creating a cover comes in part from experimentation. Kris Rusch talked about this in her weekly article recently. Kris found that certain books that sold poorly with bland covers didn’t take off until she came up with splendid covers. With her first book of the Fey series, Kris got the same treatment from Bantam that I did. Her cover was grossly sub-professional.
When the first book in the Fey came out, I remember picking it up and looking at it. You should know that I was once in a writing group with Kris, and I very much admire her. She was a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Best Editor, an award that she richly deserved. She’s an excellent writer and frequently goes up for awards in science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery or horror. I’ve seen her as a finalist for half a dozen awards at one time—all under different pseudonyms.
So I’m predisposed for many reasons to buy her work. Since I love fantasy, I looked at that book very carefully. I knew what was happening. She’d sold the book just before Bantam was bought out by publisher that trashed their fantasy line. The art director gave her a terrible cover because they didn’t intend to sell the work anyway. Part of me really, really wanted to buy that book. But I didn’t.
Know why? Because I looked at it and thought, “I don’t want to be seen in public, flying home on the plane, reading a book with such a crappy cover. Sure, I could support my friend, try to help save her career as a fantasy writer by buying that book, but nothing that I do is going to convince people to pick it up.”
Finally, Kris commissioned a new cover for the book and has put it out electronically. It looks great. In her weekly article, Kris shows her old cover along with her new one. You can see them at http://kriswrites.com/2011/08/10/the-business-rusch-comparisons/
Note that in her article, Kris mentions another article who was able to get a gorgeous cover this way, too.
My point here is that people will judge your book by its cover. You do it, I do it, and others will, too. So I think that I’d like to take a couple of days and talk about what makes a good cover.
1 Comments:
makes me glad i never went that route.
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