I don’t imagine Dickens lost an awful lot of sleep worrying
about the cover designs for his novels. ‘Bleak House,’ he might have thought,
‘let’s go for a plain cover, in brown leather, with the title embossed in
gold.’ ‘Ah Charles,’ the publisher might have said, ‘we’re toying with a plain
red cover with a silver embossed title.’ Controversial.
But these days - covers matter. They matter a lot. It can be
irksome for a writer who has spent two years working on a novel to discover
that the cover is the main topic of interest for the local book group. But
publishers too, get very exercised by cover designs. Of course they do. A good
cover can sell a lot of books. A poor cover can consign a book to the remainders store. Enter one of the most important people in the business - the cover designer. The cover designer has to be an artist, an alchemist, and a
magician. He or she has to capture the essence of a novel in a single image,
has to make it striking, compelling, and simultaneously unique. It has to be a
cover you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be hiding behind on the tube, but a cover
that will catch your eye on a book shelf. It has to scatter hints on genre and
location and mood. It has to be serious. It has to be light. Who, I wonder,
would be a cover designer?
I love the hardback
cover for ‘The Coincidence Authority.’ The plain image of the seagull and the
sharp blue of the background seem to capture the whimsical essence of the
story in a clear, eye-catching way. I also love the dreamy, faraway qualities
of the US cover So I was a little surprised when Orion’s brilliant paperback
editor Gail Paten told me that she was commissioning a redesign. Did it need
one? ‘Yes,’ she told me. And she was pretty emphatic. Paperbacks are different
creatures to hardbacks. The rules change. We talked about some of the ideas.
Should it reflect the African themes of the story? Or something else?
Today W&N have revealed the new
cover, and Gail has blogged about the hard work that went into the design. It is humbling to discover just how many people and how many ideas and how much
talent went into the new cover. But for
me it is perfect. It captures, with the wheel of fortune, the essential mystery
of chance that lies at the heart of the book, with echoes of the fairground
where the young Azalea is abandoned, and hints of a buried romance; and it does
all this in a brilliantly colourful way. The tag line if perfect (She believes
in fate. He believes in fact. What are the chances of a happy ending?) It is so
good, I wish I’d written it myself. So thank you Gail, and Steve and Edward and
everyone else who contributed. I absolutely love the cover.
What do you think? Please let me know …
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