Autopope! - "Where do your book covers come from?"

01:19 pm - "Where do your book covers come from?"

This is mizkit's fault; she posted on her LJ about how Harlequin deal with author input on book covers, and I felt the need to respond. Go read what she said, it's enlightening: Harlequin have a formal Art Fact Sheet that authors have to fill in for each book, which goes into the pipeline to the art director who presumably does the usual shuffling of commissioning cover artwork, graphic design for the text overlays, getting the blurb writer to supply copy, and so on.

No two publishers work the same way, and Harlequin are quite different from those publishers I've dealt with in the SF/F fields. In particular, I'd like to say that no author is responsible for what ends up on the cover of their book (unless they publish it themselves) but the degree to which they're consulted by the publisher varies wildly.

Here are my experiences:

1. Ace. $editor says, "do you have any preferences?" (Preferences can be vague -- "make this book visually different from the last, so readers don't mistake it for a sequel" [or vice versa] or explicit, but basically all that happens is $editor mentions the author's preferences to the art director, who rules with a whim of iron. (No disasters so far.)

Interestingly, Ace bought THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES after Golden Gryphon had put it out in hardback -- and it looks like the artist actually read the whole thing, cover to cover (and Got It). I've rarely seen a cover that worked so well or reflected the contents of the book so accurately. (I can't wait to see what they do with THE JENNIFER MORGUE!)

2. Tor. "Here's the cover for your next book -- do you like it?" Art director briefs external artist to prepare painting; no advance input solicited from author. On the other hand, feedback works: "if that's the heroine, you got her hair colour wrong" resulted in a subtle re-work on the final DJ. (I'll give them credit for being extremely busy but not large-corporate enough to implement something systematic like an AFS, and move on.)

3. Orbit. See Tor, above. My first two covers were great, my third cover sucked mildly (but not enough to scream and stamp and hold my breath over -- they were trying to go for a mainstream/crossover effect, and it didn't work in my opinion, but it wasn't a gouge-your-eyes-out mess that would justify risking pissing off my hard-working editor: it was merely low-side-of-average).

4. Golden Gryphon. Here, in small press land, the artist is as much of a major draw as the author, and gets his name on the DJ too: Steve Montiglio. And in both the books they published, we went through an exhaustive process whereby Steve would knock out some roughs covering a range of visual themes, and $editor and I would play "hotter", "no, colder" until we zeroed in on a final design. This was very much a case of the artist imposing their style on the concept (but having an MS to work from), rather than being given a brief by an art director, and while I can see this process being too time-consuming for a publisher with a busy schedule, it worked well. (The cover of THE ATROCITY ARCHIVE then had a horrible font dumped on it by the typesetter, but I whinged about this and THE JENNIFER MORGUE's DJ looks a whole lot better -- while still saying "I am a sequel to that other book".)

5. Subterranean Press: again, as with Golden Gryphon, the artist is a big draw; in the case of MISSILE GAP I got J. K. Potter, who read the novella then decided what he was going to do thematically. Again, there was some to-ing and fro-ing while $editor and I worked out what we wanted. I'm fairly happy with what we got.

General conclusion: if you demand input, the small presses will let you have it -- but they'll pick the artist, and they'll be demanding input, too. Larger publishers are less likely to give you much input, but if you express preferences they'll listen, and if you spot a big mistake, they'll often try to fix it.

If you're a published author, feel free to add your own experiences!

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