Look At Me One Last Time
August 20th, 2009
People have asked me if I was going to do the cover for my forthcoming book, a question they ask because of my background in visual arts. Naturally my answer is no, and then the response is usually ‘isn’t that unfair given it’s your book?’
But actually it’s not my book. And it wouldn’t be a book if the publishers didn’t put their money and people behind it. It’s my manuscript, but it’s our book, a collaborative effort. The amount of person-hours going into shaping the manuscript and bringing it to publication is phenomenal. Then they advertise it and put bundles of them in trucks and drive them all over the continent and then sit back and hope they’ve picked a winner. So, yeah, they can have the cover
I have seen the cover and I’m happy with it, and I’ve seen most of the numerous ideas the designer came up with. The publishers asked what I didn’t want, and if I had burst into tears and flung their choice across the room I’m sure they would have changed it – but no way would they let me near the responsibility for designing it. (And I probably wouldn’t get another contract)
What would I come up with if I were allowed to do the cover, I wonder? My interpretation of the themes of the book, and the images that I use could be so off-putting and downright upsetting to many people. Or they might not work in the hundred different ways that a book cover has to work. And then there is a big gap between contemporary visual art practice and book cover design. The former sometimes takes a perverse pride in not selling and producing discomfort in the viewer. And we don’t want that in the bookshop - plenty of other places to go for a dose of outrage.
Book covers perplex me. Shopping for them is a very different experience to my usual shopping trips. I wander down supermarket aisles and buy by colour and format. I buy the same things usually and my brain goes for a picnic while I just reach, grab, toss, reach, grab, toss and thence to cash register. If you asked me what brands I bought I’d be hard pressed to tell you. Sometimes they change the packaging and I have to snap out of my reverie and make a decision or root around and find my normal brand of tuna. I resent that; I don’t want to think when I shop. And too many times have I not paid enough attention and arrive home with something different to what I intended.
I felt that creeping perplexity the other day in an airport bookshop. Hundreds and hundreds of covers were competing for my attention. How could I choose? I wanted to buy something so I walked up and down the aisles and sometimes I’d stop and pick up a book – not for the title but because something in the image resonated with me. Some covers shrieked at me ‘you would hate me,’ and others, particularly in the crime section said ‘if you want a ballsy read, pal, choose me, otherwise f**k off.’
Around and around I went. I felt, as my hand reached out for a book, that a character like Christof from The Truman Show was in Marketing HQ saying, ‘she’s made a decision, quiet everybody…she’s picking up the … yes, she’s picking up the purple embossed one, quick look inside her neo cortex and find which lights are flashing.’
Those marketing people would love to know how an impulse buy is made. But I can’t help them. So visually battered was I that I felt like I was in a scrum of colourful beggars all with their hands held out, whining beseechingly, ‘have pity on me, lady, I’m near the end of my six week shelf life, I’ll go into the backlists and then remainders, for god’s sake, BUY ME!’
I fell with relief on the Penguin re releases and found an old friend decked out in the modest and sober orange, black and white. I’d read this book many years ago, when it too wore a flamboyant look-at-me cover, and that day in the airport it appeared to be just the thing – there was security of satisfaction. It’s well written, a good story, a classic haven’t read for a decade. All the others – titivated up in their embossed card and luxury flaps exhausted me. I couldn’t commit, I wasn’t going to risk surrender to such a delicious seduction, because I could have opened it on the plane and realised it was just a physical thing. Too late then, isn’t it?
I prefer second hand bookshops most of the time anyway, so I suspect the marketing supremos would give me up as a dead loss. Stick to writing, honey, they’d say, and leave the rest to us. And I shall do that with pleasure.
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Categories: media and promotion | Tags: art, books, marketing, publicity, publishing, self promotion
3 Comments
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I’m sure you would have done a beautiful cover. But it is wise of you to have ‘let go’.
Very interested to see the final product.
Letting go wasn’t an option - there was never anything to hang onto! It’s simply not done for authors to do their covers, or for children’s authors to do their own illustrations (although there are some exceptions in the latter case.)
Can’t wait to see the cover they design. Have you said what the title is yet?