{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1056", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "whorl", "thread": { "id": 1056, "subject": "Generic Thoughts on book covers", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "2000-12-08T10:24:05+00:00", "last": "2000-12-08T18:42:50+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2000-12-08T10:24:05+00:00", "subject": "(whorl) Generic Thoughts on book covers", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Thank you Rev Corbin." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I thought the covers for LAKE OF THE LONG SUN and EXODUS FROM THE LONG SUN\nwere both attractive and skillfully executed -- they had an air of old-\nfashioned futurity, like the kind of paintings people living in the Whorl\nmight have actually made, as opposed to the stiffly-posed, airbrushed\ntechno-\nfetishism of, say, a David Weber cover." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Mind you, I actually _like_ Weber (though not the covers), at least the \nHH books. (True confessions, anyone?) That being the case, I agree;\nthese are excellent. " }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "NIGHTSIDE and CALDE were ehhhh, but not embarrassing. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I thought NIGHTSIDE was one of the best portrayals of the inside of a\nbig spinning cylinder world-ship I've ever seen. (They actually did it\nvery well on BABYLON-5, also, but only used it a couple of times.)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "The new TPBs of FREE LIVE FREE and DOCTOR DEATH are both attractive\nand classily understated." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Bought the ISLAND... edition, because my nasty little dayglo orange pb\nhad vanished somewhere along the line; I agree, it's nice, but if I \nwere going to buy a book and didn't know about Gene Wolfe I think I \nwould guess, looking at it, that it was a popular science book on \nsociobiology or maybe AI. Haven't seen the FLF, I still have my ugly\nsilver pb. (That's another one I don't much like, cometathinkabouddit,\nmostly because of the garish silver.)" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "The Short Sun jackets have good layouts and nice printing quality --\nit's the pictures themselves, or more accurately what they depict,\nthat bug me. Call me crazy, but I don't like walking around with\nnaked women or badly-rendered aliens on my book covers...they drag\nthe books back into the mire of generic adolescent sf/fantasy.\n\nLiteral representation is the telltale mark of genre muck -- how\nmany abstract fantasy novel covers have you seen lately, for instance?\n(The only ones I can think of belong to Terry Pratchett books.) " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "... which certainly aren't genre _muck_. \n\nObservation: I don't think they're the telltale mark of \"genre \nmuck\"; I think they're the telltale mark of genre, period. \n\nThe following is partially-informed speculation, but I think it\nhas validity. To the extent I am wrong about what goes on in\npublishers' heads, it at least represents what someone with a\nbit of knowledge about marketing in general \"gets\" from perusing\nthe covers of many books over many years.\n\nPublishers, contrary to popular belief, actually do hope to make \nmoney by publishing and selling books, and they seem to have \nworked out a rather elaborate collection, not of appeals in the \ntraditional sales sense, but of marketing codes that tell customers \nwhat _kind_ of book this is. Not just \"this is an SF novel,\" but -- \ntaking Weber as an example -- \"this is a military adventure SF novel \nwith a great deal of attention paid to hardware and a tough female \nprotagonist:\" you can look at _any_ Honor Harrington novel and know \nthat without reading the blurb. (Someday I shall figure out how \npublishers' marketing departments design blurbs; I imagine they have \nsome kind of technique, but I can't make heads nor tails of it.)\n\nThere are basically three kinds of fiction books, from a marketing\npoint of view: the stand-alone blockbuster, the genre book, and the \nbook whose author is the primary selling point (the Brand Name \nwriter). \n\nNow, the Brand Name Writer gets his or her name in great big letters; \nfurthermore, if the author has a long-standing relationship with a \nsingle publisher, his or her books tend to have a unified \"look.\" The \nTerry Pratchett paperbacks you mentioned are a beautiful example of \nthis, and I'm rather sorry they seem to have broken the design rules \nwith the pb cover for CARPE JUGULUM. When I first saw it, in a drug\nstore, I didn't realize at first that it _was_ a Discworld book -- I\ndon't buy them in h/c. \n\nUnfortunately, Gene Wolfe is not _quite_ enough of a Brand Name to \nqualify for this -- though his individual series, at least, seem to \nqualify for unified look-and-feel treatment (not all series do).\n\nFor the stand-alone blockbuster (which includes books that the\npublisher thinks/hopes may be a breakthrough for an existing writer; \nfirst novels by a writer the publisher thinks/hopes is at the \nbeginning of a groovy faboo career as the next Brand Name; books that \nHollywood has evinced big-money interest in; and books that just seem \nlikely to capture the attention of the public this month), there are \na fairly limited variety of layouts. They generally involve great big \nletters for the title, smaller letters for the author's name, and \nlimited or no illustration, but there are a couple that don't; the \nmain thing is they're incredibly eyegrabbing and intended to sit in\nvery public spaces like B.Waldencrown windows or dumps by the front\ncounter of Bornes&Nodlers.\n\nThat leaves the genre book. Genre as a marketplace phenomenon exists \nfor the mutual convenience of publishers (who want to sell books), \nbooksellers (who want not only to sell them but to shelve them in a \ncoherent manner), and readers/bookbuyers, in precisely that order: \nbecause publishers, by their position in the supply chain, _define_ \ngenre (as a marketplace phenomenon). \n\nFrom the publisher's point of view, the genre book must appeal to the \ngenre buyer -- in fact, to the sub-genre buyer; a book may have \"SF\" \non the cover, but the actual marketing approach is, as suggested in my \ncomment on David Weber covers above, much more focused than that. \n\nFrom the bookseller's point of view, the same is true, and furthermore \nthe genre book must be clearly labelled as such so the bookseller knows \nwhere to put it. Books like \"J.D. Robb\" (Nora Roberts)'s Eve Dallas \nseries can be a nightmare for booksellers. Since most of you probably \nwouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, a bit of description: they're\npolice-procedural murder mysteries, set in a near-to-middle future \n(actually the dates given, about the middle of the 21st century, don't\nseem very plausible given the level of space mobility involved), whose\nheroine is involved in an ongoing, hot, romance with a mysterious\nbillionaire known only as \"Roarke.\" Shelve as mystery? SF? Romance,\nwith Roberts's other books? The publisher is semi-helpful: the spines\nlabel the books as \"Romantic Suspense.\" I've seen them shelved in the\nromance section and the mystery section -- often in the same store --\nbut never in the SF section. (That I first encountered them in an SF\nbookshop is particularly indicative; they were off the main shelves,\nin the shop's smallish mystery section.)\n\nFor the book buyer or reader... Well, that's another question. There\nare a _lot_ of readers who buy books based on their covers. Put \nguns, machines, and a big-breasted woman in uniform (preferably\nleather or at least black) on the cover and you have a target audience\nwho will probably buy at least one book by the author. Put dragons\non the cover -- wait a minute, there's (at least) two conventions\nwith dragons: the one where somebody's fighting them (or, in close\nup, the dragon is breathing fire), and the convention where the dragon\nis someone's friend, often with the friend on the dragon's back,\nflying - the McCaffrey-and-her-imitators (including, these days,\nMcCaffrey) convention. Plus the cute/semi-abstract dragon convention, \nas on the (original, at least) covers of TEA WITH THE BLACK DRAGON \nand A BOOK DRAGON.\n\nThose of us who buy all sorts of books are actually a very small part\nof the bookbuying audience. I like to shop at local stores, but I'm\ninclined to spend time in the larger Barnes/Borders-type stores, \nbecause there I can wander around, picking up things from all sorts \nof different shelves and utterly confusing the occasional semi-helpful\nemployee who wants to help me find something else I'd enjoy. \n\n(This is especially fun in the CD section, where they're not quite sure \n_what_ to make of someone who comes up to the counter with the new King \nCrimson and a Copland collection, and asks for advice on pre-Castro Cuban \nbig band/flute jazz. \"Buying presents?\" \"No, it's all for me...\")\n\nGetting back to my point (All together now: \"and I *do* have one\"), \ngiven that Wolfe isn't a blockbuster or a Big enough Name to warrant a \nLook And Feel, he's going to get genre covers. Or, in fact, sub-genre\ncovers. The Short Sun books are apparently being treated as planetary \nadventure; which is about the right subgenre, when you come right down \nto it. We can just bloody well like it or lump it. \n\nI like it; I think it does maximize his sales -- youall and I are going\nto buy them anyway, and maybe J. Random Subgenre Buyer will too. But I\nalso like genre covers; I grew up with them, I consider them a legitimate\nstyle of commercial-art-with-occasional-fine-art-tendencies. And if you \nhate the cover, buy the hardcover (you would anyway, wouldn't you?) and \nleave the dj at home -- which I do also, but to protect the dj." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "There are plenty of approaches that would have worked equally well or\nbetter. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Not, I think, for marketing-and-sales purposes." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "For instance, since both OBW and IGJ could be considered planetary\nromances, a well-done landscape painting or a Photoshopped photograph\nwould have been classy while still communicating some of the exotic appeal\nof the novels." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Well, okay. Maybe. But I think the planetary adventure novel codes require\none (1) Alien Creature on the cover...even if there's none in the book." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Another alternative would have been to depict the events of the books in\nmetaphorical fashion, like on the British paperbacks of Iain M. Banks (USE\nOF WEAPONS, for instance, has a great cover illo of an empty chair lit by\na solitary floodlight with a gun sitting on the floor and a battleship\nsilhouette in the background...you'll not find those props in the novel,\nbut they perfectly convey the tone of the book). " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I'm not sure *how* they market Banks. I went and looked at that cover\n-- it could have come from a '60s Bantam murder mystery. But I think \nBritish publishers' marketing departments work differently anyway." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Or the publishers could have forgone an illustration entirely and\ngrabbed the reader's attention by sheer dint of design work, like on\nWilliam Gibson and Neal Stephenson's recent novels, or the gorgeous\nAlfred Bester and PK Dick paperbacks they've been rereleasing." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The first two are Brand Name writers; the latter two have moved into \nthe space of \"dead prestige writers,\" which have another whole set of\nrules." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Forgive the rant, but I remain convinced that half of sf's problem\nin connecting with the public at large can be laid at the feet of just\nplain bad book design -- printing processes and paper stock may have\nimproved since the pulp era, but the underlying aesthetic is the same:\n\"naked women and/or monsters sell books\", and incidentally keep away\npeople who might otherwise be tempted to try them." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Can you provide anecdotal evidence of anyone who might have tried GW\nbut hasn't because of his covers?\n\n--Dan'l\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Peter Westlake", "address": "peter at harlequin.co.uk" }, "date": "2000-12-08T18:42:50+00:00", "subject": "Re: (whorl) Generic Thoughts on book covers", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 10:24 2000-12-08 -0800, you wrote:\n(This is especially fun in the CD section, where they're not quite sure \n_what_ to make of someone who comes up to the counter with the new King \nCrimson and a Copland collection, and asks for advice on pre-Castro Cuban \nbig band/flute jazz. \"Buying presents?\" \"No, it's all for me...\")" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I had no idea there *was* a new King Crimson - the last one I saw\nwas \"Three of a Perfect Pair\", which was held up as a great example\nof the new medium, Compact Discs. I really must get out more. Thanks!\n\nPeter.\n\nP.S. Sorry, I just meant this to go to Dan'l, but the list isn't\nset up that way, and I didn't notice till I'd sent it.\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] } ] }