Don’t Judge a Cover by the Book
We all judge books by their covers. In the same way, we make initial assessments of people we meet for the first time. It’s that first glance, the handshake, the first words someone says. You might have thought that these things shouldn’t really matter as much as they do. But they do. I have certainly had experiences where I have gotten off on the wrong foot with someone and thus know from personal experience how long it can take to “correct” such adverse first impressions. Much better to get that first encounter right.
Air-brush surrealism.
David Pelham’s trade-mark ultra-clean surrealism is a perfect complement to J.G. Ballard’s writing.
It’s the same with a book cover — the cover is an author’s chance to make a good first impression. “Good” is, perhaps, the wrong word. “Right,” or some synonym, might be better. My idea of a good book cover is one that gives an impression or at least a decent hint of what the reader will be getting into if s/he decides to read the book.
It is here that I should express some sympathy (rather than the usual cleverly disguised envy) for authors published by conventional publishing companies. Although I have no direct experience of conventional book publishing, all the sources I have consulted indicate that it is not the author who chooses the cover, but the publishing company. I, for one, would not want to cede such an important decision to a marketing department, whose goals may or may not match those of the author.
Scale, emptiness and incongruity.
This Bruce Pennington composition places the mundane against a barren alien landscape to create a strange, dream-like scene..
Different genres of fiction and non-fiction can have substantially different rules for what is expected of a good cover. Many self-help books eschew images altogether and focus on conveying information through the careful or clever use of text and design. Photography books often do precisely the opposite. Romance books seem to require a couple, the man often bare-chested and the woman swooning in his arms.
Science fiction books have their own conventions, and tropes, of course. There are lots of bad SF book covers, some just plain bad, but others so bad they are good (I offer one among many examples here, for the novel Kometkatastrofen).
Alien with an olive on top.
Sometimes a cover is so bad its good.
Still, as a literature of ideas, some artists and designers have taken this opportunity to create truly memorable covers. Two cover designers who did this, in my opinion, (and made a big impression on me in the process) were David Pelham and Bruce Pennington, which probably dates me fairly accurately if you also take into account that I spent a lot of time in second-hand bookstores in my youth.
The stark, airbrushed surrealism of David Pelham’s art for Penguin’s SF series was a perfect complement to J.G Ballard’s surreal tales of future disaster — see his cover for The Four-Dimensional Nightmare. Bruce Pennington’s dramatic, detailed landscapes — I want to write “futurescapes” (have I coined a word, there?) — and their often fantastic (and many times surreal) inhabitants were, to use that horrible phrase, pure eye-candy my younger self just could not resist. His cover for The Airs of Earth by Brian Aldiss is among the restrained examples of his art.
Of course, I wanted a cover equally as dramatic for this first book of mine, The Glass Weaver’s Tale. I did not feel I could justify the funds to commission even a young up-and-coming artist to create a cover de novo, given the likely sales of the book: I am reliably told that an author, especially a self-published author, should not expect to sell many copies of his/her first book outside of kindly family members and friends. Nor did/do I have any idea how to go about commissioning a good cover, anyway.
No, what I had to rely on was finding a cover, ready-made, that fit the bill.
And against all the odds (as it seemed to me) I did.