Let’s say you’re working on a book. Let’s say you’d like for it to be reviewed in the pages of the New Yorker, and not sitting on the free-to-a-good-home book bench.
A good idea — short of becoming Philip Roth — would be to start planning your cover right now.
When you sort through hundreds of books a week, it’s hard not to resort to snap judgments. Anything with women’s shoes on the cover is chick lit; anything with a title that takes up the entire cover page is a thriller; anything with a plain blue background and text in thin white letters is some abstruse but probably fascinating scholarly book from M.I.T.
I think it is unjust that people who get paid to sort through books are resorting to snap judgments. But since they are — and have the guts to admit it — I think authors should be prepared.
If you want to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers at the New Yorker, here are some tips:
- don’t include any women walking, or women with closets, either of which might tempt a cover artist to render a woman’s shoe.
- no long titles. This is no guarantee — for example, PREY, just 4 letters, was rendered in a big font — but you’re asking for trouble with a lot of long words. So if you were thinking of following in the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, think again.
- use plain words. Plain words that will not lead people to think you are abstruse. In fact, avoid “abstruse.” Otherwise you will end up with a book that looks smart. A book that appears, to the people who sort through books at the New Yorker, to be bafflingly smart. To the giveaway book bench with you, smartypants book!
What’s really interesting is that these rules don’t hold true at all. Sure, the MIT Press website has a blue background, but many of their books’ covers are brightly-colored; a good percentage have cool photos (America’s Food, Andy Warhol: Blow Job).
As for titles? Amazon’s bestsellers in thrillers are evenly divided between BIG AUTHOR NAME/little title and little author name/BIG TITLE. I know some of these books are designed to SCREAM AT YOU from an AIRPORT BOOKSTALL, but many of them have jumped on the more subtle, literary-fictionlike design wagon. Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw has a tiny title and a big black and white photo, maybe from the 1950s, of a woman sitting in a man’s lap in front of a cafe, lost in a kiss. And on the cover of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett’s name is much larger than the title, both of which are superimposed over a line drawing of plans for a gothic cathedral. Way arty.
But then we get to shoes. Indeed, 20% of Amazon’s top 20 women’s fiction books have shoes on the cover (BTW, go Janelle Brown, clocking in at #8!, with a sundae, not a shoe). The only “literature & fiction” book with a shoe on the cover is the one that tops the women’s fiction list. Shoes still indicate chick lit. Beware: even The Time Traveler’s Wife has shoes on the cover. Not a Chicago library. Shoes. So if you have a character that walks or travels, you may be sucked into the shoe-cover vortex; it seems there is no escape.
The problem, Carolyn, and is that almost no author has input into what gets put onto the cover of their published book. It doesn’t matter if all your characters are barefoot, if you’re writing chick-lit, there’s a very good chance (as you mention) that shoes will be on the cover.
Unless you’re a BIG NAME (and sometimes not even then), publishers typically won’t even consult the author on cover art/design. And frankly, they shouldn’t; most authors are not artists or designers, no matter how adept they are at Photoshop, and have no idea what makes a good cover. Hence all of the phenomenally awful-looking books produced through Publish America.
But I sympathize. This is a topic that has been debated for decades within speculative fiction, where characters have been grossly misrepresented on book covers by some publishers, in an attempt to just get readers to pick up the damn book (which is the function of cover art in the first place). Things are better now than even 10 years ago, but there are still instances of such disconnect that you can’t help wondering if the designer even knew what the book was about.
Sadly, in the end, unless an author is self-publishing, they will likely have no input into how their book is designed and what goes on the cover. All we can do is write the best book we can so that when the reader turns over the cover, they stick around for the duration.