Ducking for Covers
The advent of the Melbourne Writers Festival has helped bring the question of book covers to the forefront of my mind once again. What I require from the festival, rather than its mad sharpened-pencil logo and the customary forums on ‘Whither the Novel?’ is one of its participants advocating abolishing pretty book covers and instead adopting a far more Communist approach to design.
To start with, for those who are unlucky enough to work in publishing, everything to do with the process of slapping a cover on a book is agony. I was reminded of this by a recent minor literary rumpus, which concerned a novel called Liar. The story about it in the Sydney Morning Herald began: ‘Her new book is about a short-haired black girl called Micah, so when the Australian author Justine Larbalestier saw the cover on advance copies of the American edition of Liar – a white girl with long hair – she knew there would be a reaction.’ To cut a short story shorter, Justine has professed to be thrilled by all the support she’s received from those who have objected on the Internet to the cover’s misleading nature, and the hardback edition will have a different jacket.
This is all well and good for Justine L, but it’s her publishers that I feel sorry for. I would argue that, rather than knowing there would be a reaction to it, what Justine L should have known was what was on the cover of her own book. In Australia, at least, while authors often don’t have cover approval in their contracts, publishers, unless they’re keen on the prospect of their existence being a living hell, aren’t going to proceed with one an author doesn’t like and of which they haven’t approved every element. They know that if they are foolhardy enough to do otherwise, the author will tell anyone who’ll listen how much they loathe the cover, and them, and that this griping will increase a thousand-fold if the author’s book doesn’t sell.
I once worked as an in-house editor, and one of my duties was checking covers of book proofs for mistakes. A book proof is, of course, typeset pages that have been bound, with a paper cover that is, usually, the same as that that will appear on the actual book. Book proofs are given out to bookshops and the press, with the aim of creating ‘buzz’, and, I am confident, go straight to the recipients’ recycling bins. Anyhow, on one occasion, I didn’t see that an author’s surname was misspelt on the spine of his novel’s book proof cover. This poor form on my part led to the author’s agent screeching at the author’s publisher at a cocktail party, and the author having to be mollified with a – no doubt, nuttily expensive – lunch. We all moved on with our lives eventually, but only after I had to undergo a spell of the publisher treating me with such revulsion and contempt that you’d think I’d been harvesting the author’s organs. And all this was over a mistake on the cover of a mere book proof.
Another example of the fuss and bother that book covers cause concerns a true-crime title on which I had the misfortune to work. The designer produced a very striking jacket, with which we at the publishers were delighted, but the author, unfortunately, hated it. It goes without saying that she was perfectly entitled to do so, but the vast amounts of ill feeling that the disagreement produced led eventually to a total breakdown of the relationship between author and publishing company. The cover that she finally approved was one that the designer had, in desperation, knocked up in approximately fifteen minutes. And, ultimately, the book didn’t sell well anyway.
Perhaps it would have sold better with the cover that we at the publishers were so in love with, but who knows? I have always been very frustrated by the automatic heaping of blame on the cover when a given book doesn’t sell. After all, perhaps a book doesn’t sell because its contents are a load of shit? Or perhaps it doesn’t sell because it’s over the heads of all the people buying anaemic Eat, Pray, Love and Marley & Me knock-offs, or insanely daft Pride and Prejudice spin-offs? When shopping for reading matter, I’ve never thought, ‘Geez, that sounds like the greatest book of all time, but I’m not buying it with that cover!’ I grant you that a cover might make me pick up a book when I wouldn’t have otherwise, but it’s also not going to make me, by means of some kind of hypnosis, buy the thing.
I’ve noticed that people who are book-cover crazy like to go on about the pleasure of books being beautiful objects. Well, if I want a beautiful object, I’ll buy some nice art glass, not gaze upon a nasty old book. When I was growing up, books looked terrible. They were, it seemed, invariably typeset in tiny Times New Roman and had covers that assaulted the eye, but we all bought them anyway. The fact that books now look so great is always supposed to be a major weapon in their arsenal in winning the war in which they are, apparently, engaged against new technology. In fact, though, hold-in-your-hand books are always going to win out against ebooks and Kindles merely because most people are already dealing with computers as much as they can stand to.
I have been arguing energetically for some time that all books should just look like the old-time orange-covered Penguins, which have now been revived as ‘Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price’. Or, if no one will agree with me on this, which, so far, they haven’t, publishers should spend, at most, one hour thinking about the design of any book cover. Look at Donna Tartt’s The Secret History; this was (absolutely correctly, in my opinion) an enormous commercial and critical success, and, on every edition that I’ve ever seen, there’s almost nothing on that goddamn cover. Just look, though, at what’s inside that cover.
Avril Rolfe is a Melbourne-based writer.
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