Author's control over book covers

Ok. How much control do they have? You see I’m a HUGE fan of Glen Cook’s Garrett books.

In his latest book Angry Lead Skies the cover consists of Garrett sitting at a table with a hat, Garret doesn’t wear hats. But that’s small and a consistant error (8 of the 10 covers have Garrett with a hat). There’s Belinda, who looks ok. But then there’s Morley Dotes. Morley is a Dark Elf. He is every father’s worst nightmare when it comes to daughters and husband’s when it comes to wives. He is supposed to be devilishly handsome. Perfect beyond reason. And yet this Morley on the cover looks more like an Orc (from LOTR) with horns. What gives? Doesn’t Cook at least get a chance to approve the cover? And Cook is successful, I mean this is the 10th book in the series! And he has other successful series.

And it’s not like the artist didn’t have anything to go on. Garrett, Belinda and Morley all appear together in the 6th cover of Red Iron Nights. And there, they look like they’re supposed to.

For completeness I’ll mention the first book. Garrett lives in a magical world, and importantly one without science. On the cover we have Garrett, who looks ok, and the Tates, who look too much like gnomes. And they are carrying semi-automatic guns. Now having that on the cover totally distorts the nature of the universe in which Garrett lives. But this I can somewhat understand as he may not have had the pull necessary to get them to change the cover back then, but certainly he does not, right?

Why do they allow these wrong covers to be put on? Lazy? Grrr!

I don’t think the authors get much choice. It’s the publishers that decide. Maybe if the author is very, very high-profile, but even then I think it’s a publishing decision.

I have met authors who HATED the covers on their work, but couldn’t do anything about it.

I don’t know how much control authors normally have, but in my case they accepted my proposed cover without any questions.

I actually wanted them to use my own photograph, the one on the opening page of my website, but they said it wasn’t up to their standards. But they accepted my second choice of a photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the book jacket is on the right):

http://medusamystery.com/jacket.htm

In most cases, authors usually have no control over the cover. Covers are comissioned by the publisher’s art director. They are selected so that the casual book browser will pick up the book (and yes, people do judge books by their cover). Thus the cover is not supposed to be an accurate representation of anything.

Nowadays, not only doesn’t the author have any say, but the artists aren’t even given a chance to read the book. The art director tells them what to include, and they do it – by their deadline – if they want to work for that publisher again.

There are also certain “rules” of what makes a good cover, some sensible (a sexy person is good) some silly (green is bad).

There are exceptions, of course. A best-selling author can request cover approval. One author, Janny Wurtz, actually does her own covers, but she was a trained artist before she began writing.

But most of the time, the first the author sees of the cover is when they mail him the cover proofs.

Most authors have about as much control over the covers of their books as Juan Valdez does over the design of the coffee can.

RealityChuck has already said most of what I could say, but let me just repeat that the point of a cover is not to accurately represent anything in the book. (Though it would certainly be nice if it did.) The point of a cover is to get people to a) pick the book up and then b) buy it. A cover that does this is a success; a cover that doesn’t is a failure. Other considerations are secondary, but the next most important one is “will the reader think the book fits the cover.” Angry Lead Skies has a guy in a fedora staring moodily at a whiskey glass while two fantasy types pose in the background; the book is a Chandleresque PI story set in a fantasy world – so the cover does tell the reader what kind of book it is.

Other points:

Some artists and designers are better than others. The better ones tend to be more expensive and busy – and they can’t work on all the books that exist. So some books (especially mass-market midlist genre stuff, like the book in question), get covers done by people who aren’t at the top of their field. (Though this obviously isn’t a simple metric – there are always great new artists starting out, and older artists coasting on their previous work.) Books that are cheaper and will make less money don’t usually get the more expensive artists.

Only a couple of genres – SF/Fantasy and Romances (and not all of the latter, either) – get the painted cover look to begin with. Most novels have stock photos or other “evocative” looking bits of art that tell the reader even less about the book.

Glen Cook is a nice guy (and a good bookseller, too), but he’s a very small fish in the publishing pond. He might get to recommend an artist occasionally, but that would be as far as his involvement in the cover goes.

And I’d say that Garrett has a hat on the cover of most of the books because a fedora says “private detective.” The only real alternative would be a trenchcoat (actually, both plus a cigarette would be the best), and I don’t remember if he ever wears one of those.

Ladies & Gentlemen, I give you the worse book cover ever.

Spectacularly dull, totally inaccurate, yet, in a simultaneous and breath-taking master-stroke, manages to spoil the ending of the story. Thank goodness I read it before this version came out. You can bet the author had no say on this one and that the artist had no idea of the significance of what she was drawing.

(Otherwise a much recommended read. :wink: )

RC and GBHH nailed it head on. “I hate my cover” is one of the favorite party games of SF/Fantasy authors. I didn’t much care for the cover on my (collaborative) novel, but at least it didn’t give away the ending.

It’s pretty much the same in textbooks, as well. My coauthor and I received a color comp of the cover along with a note, which said, in part,

Which, given the appeal-to-authority pile-on, I took to really mean, “If you don’t like it, shaddap already.”

Could you spoil it for me please? I already looked at the cover so apparently I know how it ends. How about leading me up to the chair and gun?

Ahhh, the memories. I used to work in the Design & Production Department of a scholarly Press (my favorite job ever, but you could not really live on the salary). The, erm, “consultations” between Marketing and the book designers were both infamous and vociferous. From the cover in, the “look” of the book was the property of D&P. Oh the sample pages circulated to all departments, but it was a formality. The dust jackets, on the other hand, were considered to fall about 50% into the domain of Marketing, and they held rejection power over not just entire mock-ups, but upon individual elements therein. Hell hath no fury like a book designer scorned.

The most notorious example involved my boss. She was the Head of Design and Production, won awards almost every year, and had a remarkable love for her craft and an even more remarkable temper when things went wrong (there were 3 printers that refused to take our money because they had run-ins with her; I heard one say that he would rather go out of business than do work for “that bitch at *****). Anyway, she had cherry-picked a book off the Fall list to design herself. It was a high-budget coffee table book with some interesting design challenges and just screamed “award winner” if she could make it work. She was the kind of designer that gets obsessed with a book, and was the typical moody up-and-down mess while she worked and reworked this or that. She spent two whole days just messing around with the PMS books and paper samples and cloth swatches to get just the look she wanted. Eventually, the color comp went off to make the rounds of the other Department Chiefs for approval. The Marketing Director, returning to work after a 3 hour liquid dinner with some of his folks at the bar down the street, rejected the jacket design in 30 seconds flat, writing the critique that it was “Either too brown, or not brown enough. Try another color.”

There were loud discussions. There was yelling and screaming. Things were thrown. Items (but no limbs) were broken. Doors were slammed. Repeatedly. To no avail. Marketing had spoken.

–jack

I echo everything said here by the knowledgeable others. This is a huge problem not just in f&sf but in all genres.

Right now in the romance world, for example, there are huge arguments brewing over whether “clinch” covers (picturing the man and woman in an embrace) are a cliche or a snazzy sales tool.

There’s also a new trend for cartoon covers for some series that are aimed at younger, more “contemporary” readers. Do these signify a light fun read or something more? Can they be applied to any other books or do they just confuse the reader?

Ah, the reader. The mythical “readers” that are being targeted by covers are the ones who buy books not just for the author’s name but because they like the genre so much they are willing to try any other title in that genre. How to get them to do that? Why, give them a cliche cover that signals “this is more of what you already like.” So you get lots of people in uniforms and spacesuits in front of spaceships on hard sf, whether that is a major part of the plot or not. Fantasy covers are softer, with fantasy type characters and landscapes. Cozies get different covers than pirvate eye or spy novels. And so on.

It gets more complicated when a publisher gets to publish a whole bunch of books by a single author, whether a trilogy, series or the complete works. The question then is just how similar to make them. Too similar and the “readers” gets confused over whether they have already picked this one up. Too dissimilar and there is no cue that these all go together.

How exactly anybody in the industry knows this without surveying the “readers” is a mystery to one and all.

Just as a side note, I’ve head several non-fiction books published, all with serious, all text covers. One of them was translated into several languages and the European editions had striking, witty, and effective pictorial covers that brought home the book’s message immediately and with a punch.

And no, I’ve never been consulted about any of my covers. It is to laugh.

Wow, thank you all. That’s a real bummer. I can just imagine the bitch fests that authors would do about how others messed with their works. I know were I an author I’d be bitching too. My apologies to all those in the field but “damn you marketing!”

He wears a trenchcoat with no hat on Cold Copper Tears. In Sweet Silver Blues, the first Garrett book, he’s just wearing a bathrobe having just woken up, no hat, no trenchcoat, but the shadows on the walls through his window read “Confidential Agent”. On this book I presume the gave Tim HIldebrandt the first two pages of the book and had him draw it from that. Because that is exactly what it is.

Hildebrandt did the first 6 covers and did good jobs. He may have known what was going on in the series to draw good covers, other then the first book the covers were really accurate from varying points in the book at varying points in the action. Then they switched. I can’t find an artist for the next one. The next one’s by Rama. The next one I can’t find a sig. But they all have the same style. The last one, the one that prompted this thread is by Puack or something. The sig is cut off.

I used to be able to find a page that showed the covers from America and Europe. I can find several which show the Russian versions but the pictures are the some. Can’t seem to find it now.