Cover Design

Covers sell books. Well, not by themselves, but covers are the "curb appeal" of books. They are what first catches the eye and makes a book stand out from all the others so that the casual browser stops for another look. Perhaps picks it up and turns it over to read the back blurb.

So it's essential to get it right. The colour, the image, the amount of detail, the title, and the font all combine to give an overall impression of what's inside. Pastels like pinks and purples suggest a nice, gentle cozy, and a cat in the image cements the impression even before you get to the title "Baking up Murder". By contrast, vivid, violent, and clashing colours like red and orange are more likely an action thriller, and moody, dark colours like grey, brown, and dark blue, often with a single, haunting image, hint at menace. If you're not in the mood for a tortured, moving read, you won't pick up that one.

Cover designers rarely read the novel beforehand. They rely on the blurbs and descriptive material provided by the editors, and sometimes, as in the case of my publisher, Dundurn Press, they ask for suggestions from the author. Here are two examples of FIRE IN THE STARS, my first Amanda Doucette mystery. Because it was a new series, there were no guidelines for how the covers ought to look. I had suggested a Newfoundland landscape, so here is the first cover that was developed.

A beautiful scene that captures the essence of Newfoundland, but does it speak of danger and menace? The scene , with its calm ocean and its quaint houses, is too peaceful and colours are too soft. After this feedback, here is the cover the designer came up with. (Thank you, Laura Boyle, you are awesome.) I think it speaks for itself.

We are now just beginning the process of designing the cover for THE ANCIENT DEAD, the fourth Amanda Doucette mystery, and this time I sent Laura about five photos taken during last fall's location trip to the Alberta badlands, and although she may find something even better, they can be a starting point for her. Here are a couple of of them.

I can't wait to see what she comes up with!

Know what makes a good book cover and why?

by Rick Blechta

Every author, whether your books come from a traditional publishing house or published by you from your own house, is going to be faced by dealing with a cover for your magnum opus.

If you have a publisher, you may not be allowed to give very much input into cover design, but having a bit of background in cover design will help because not every design is going to be a tremendous work of art. Even experienced designers can make bad choices (heaven knows I have!) and when the publicity, sales, and editorial departments get involved, the waters get even more muddy.

In some cases you may not even be consulted. Even if you are consulted and come up with some good reasons for not liking what they’re going to put on your book, your publisher still retains a “get-out-of-jail-free” card: “I’m sorry but this is a marketing decision.” But if you have a bit of knowledge you might at least talk them into listening to you, even if you’re ultimately ignored.

If you’re self-published, then every aspect of the book’s cover design is completely on your shoulders, and every bit of knowledge and good advice you can get your hands on will get you that much closer to a successful book cover.

Cover Stories

Since All Men Fear Me came out, people are always asking me about the man on the cover, but since the publisher chose the cover and I had no more to do with it than to say, "I like it", I could never tell them who he is, only that he is a perfect depiction of the villain in the book. However, thanks to a curious reader who actually queried my publisher about the cover photo*, I now know who the man is!

Here's what the cover artist revealed: "I acquired the actual photo (not a scan or reproduction) from a collector. It is an original 1900s mug shot one of about a dozen that I purchased. The collection is quite intriguing; each mug shot has a frontal face photo, a profile photo and on the back is the name of the arrested and a hand-written description of their crime! Although there were some murderers in the collection of mug shots, this man was arrested for being a 'disorderly person'. His alias was 'Jack the Hugger' and he was arrested in Jersey City, NJ in 1903."

Now there's a story. I imagine old Jack was just a bubble off plumb, and was arrested for walking around Jersey City giving random hugs to people whether they liked it or not. The saga of the man in the photo has caused me to ponder the history of the covers on my novels. When my first book came out in 2005, Amazon and the ebook were not the juggernauts they are today. Just in the past few years, cover artists have to take into consideration that most people will first see the book cover as a thumbnail online.

I was told that a book cover is like a movie poster. The whole point is to intrigue the potential reader. For my early novels in the Alafair Tucker series, the production supervisor asked me to send family photos for the cover artist to work with. So I provided the photo on novels one through four, which have rather busy covers and look a bit cut-and-paste to me.



By 2011, when the fifth novel, Crying Blood, came out, the internet was the thing, and nobody asked me to provide anything. The only input I had was when they sent me the mock-up and said, "here it is. Hope you like it." The cover artist had created a simple, colorful cover that looks good online or on a physical book. When All Men came out late last year, the cover was down to its bare essentials. The book is looking right at you. "Buy me," it says, "or you'll be sorry."

One of my favorites, the tornado book, 2014

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*Here is what the curious reader said to the publisher: "he must have been a murderer! His face was so creepy that I had to turn the book face down on the coffee table when I wasn't reading it!" She then called back a little while later to clarify that she did not mean to insult the cover--in fact, quite the opposite; she thought it caught the spirit of the villain and the book perfectly!

Stuff and blather

by Rick Blechta

Sorry I missed my spot last Tuesday. I was sick as a dog with a 24-hour bug of some sort. I’ll spare all and sundry the gory details, but to demonstrate how horrible I was feeling all that day, I’ll tell you this: I didn’t even turn on my computer. I can’t remember when that last happened. I also felt horribly guilty for abandoning my duties.

Today’s post will kind of bounce around to various things that I’ve been cogitating on but which don’t warrant a full post. Here goes…

The publishing industry continues to go through a pretty amazing period of upheaval. I won’t go into how authors are getting an even shorter end of the stick through all this. I sometimes wonder if we ink-stained wretches should form a union and start negotiating with the publishing industry as a united group. I’m sure the idea has been floated before. Knowing how writers operate, I can imagine the chaos putting together an organization like this would create, and there would always be those who prefer to travel their own path — making the whole exercise even more difficult. Like everything else in the arts these days, authors are preyed on by others to do more and more things for free. If we could go back as recently as 50 years, we would realize how radically the writer’s plight has changed — and we’re expected to do it for even less.

I’m continually amazed at how book cover design seems to be going downhill. A lot of it can be explained by the rise of self-publishing. As much as it irks me at times, there is a good reason publishers try to keep authors at a distance when it comes to creating a “face” for their works. From speaking to authors, both mainstream and self-published, it’s pretty clear that the relative simplicity of cover art (only three main ingredients: title, author and image) causes them to think that book covers are simple things when the direct opposite is true. But I’m also finding the art departments of mainstream publishers taking an increasingly cavalier approach to book cover design. With few exceptions, cover art is chosen by cost, rather than commissioned. This means that those images are becoming generic and disconnected. If you’re a big-name author, your works’ covers might not even get an image, just huge type with your name and the book’s title. And that’s a cover? It’s a disturbing trend.

Lastly, I notice that Barnes & Noble is abandoning the Nook reader. I love it when an industry gets everyone to buy into some new technology only to have it chucked because some other competing technology beat it out. Remember the short-lived HD DVDs? Blu-Ray smoked that in not much more than a year. Sure, we can always expect technology to move on and improve, but it’s the idea of one knocking out another competing platform that gets my goat. Will Kindle go on to destroy Kobo? Amazon sure hopes so. But in the end, it’s always the consumer who suffers – in their pocketbook. This sort of thing gets tedious after awhile.

Do you have anything that bugs you like this?