Cover Art Smackdown: Judging books by their covers

I'd always been aware that there were good book covers and bad book covers. But it took a friend to specifically point out that the difference could usually be found in whether a book was the US edition or the UK/Australian edition (Australian editions generally inherit their cover art from their parent publishers in the UK rather than US. Maybe it's a flow-on effect due to the difficulty in replacing z with s, and o with ou?).

Since we inherit our designs from the old country, the question is then, why do UK publishers think so little of their readership that everything needs to be packaged in such prosaic drabness? Does the reading public demand it? Are Australian publishers obligated to reproduce the UK artworks? Because even native Australian books are often poorly designed. Are they allowed to produce their own cover artwork, but it's too expensive to do so? (If so, dear publishers, please feel free to contact me for a competitive quote!)

The obvious answer to these questions is that people are easily led fools - they don't want to think for themselves, they like everything to be packaged in easily discernable bundles.

No doubt there's been millions of dollars spent on research for what appeals to particular demographics, with the overall purpose to determine how few design ideas can be trotted out to appeal to the largest number of audiences. As a result, the usual Australian bookshop (in real life or online, either way) is filled with variations on one of the following covers:

Thank god for the simple elegance of Penguin classics, I say.

Branding into basic categories works, of course. Readers become acquainted with the look and feel of the books they like, and gravitate towards them. As such it becomes a honey trap all its own, luring in the unsuspecting customer by appearing to be the latest Lee Child book, when in reality it's only Robert Crais. (No offence to however Robert Crais is).

The danger lies, I suppose, in the fact that if someone doesn't know what a book is going to be like, they might not pick it up, let alone buy it. It works the other way, too. There are those of us who won't pick up a book because it's so clearly branded as a particular kind of book smacks of desperation. And now that desperation is infecting all genres. (For the most part, I'm talking about popular fiction here, but you can probably through in a lot of biographies and history books, too).

The irony of this situation is that when I finally bought the first volume of the 'phenomenon', The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I did so simply because of the contrast between book covers. When Stieg Larsson's trilogy first took off, you could not avoid it. It's omnipresent, uninspired cover art (courtesy of Quercus Publishing) convinced me that this was not the kind of book I needed to read. It looked to me to be just another bulky 'sexy' thriller: the anonymous features of a bare-backed woman, her face turned away from us in shadow. The titular dragon tattoo rendered unimaginatively on her shoulder. Red background- suggesting sex, danger, whatever. Part two's cover is even worse- deep blue colouring, the characters sits on a fading motorcycle (= rebellious, you see). Please, no surprises for ye who enter here, I thought.

But when I stumbled upon the US edition (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) I suddenly became interested. The wonderful cover art hinted at an intricately designed mystery. Lost under washes of yellow and green colours, the barely discernible details of a labyrinthine illustration suggested the knotty complexity of the novel within. The bold, black words of the titles slither down the page like the trail of a snake, fragments of which vanish into the opaque background. This promised far more than the other covers- here was something brave, elaborate and detailed. I'd been deceived, I thought- this was a book I needed to read immediately.

The one upside to the disparity in cover art is that the US edition caught my eye largely because of its distinction from the UK/Australian edition. The Quercus publishers had simply got the book wrong, I thought. (I didn't like the book as it turned out. I though it an arduous slog. But it did make a great couple of movies).

The distinction in artwork seems to have as much to do with an absence of knowledge about the product as it speaks to lack of trust in the customer. Dan Simmon's brilliant The Terror has been given particularly shoddy treatment. A richly detailed literary horror novel about the true life Franklin expedition in 1845, it was given a suitably brilliant cover by the US publishers Back Bay books. The title serves a clever dual purpose- one of the actual ships of the expedition, HMS Terror becomes lodged in the arctic ice and is preyed upon by some unseen terror. The cover artist used a period style painting of a desolate, hopeless scene and a classical font for the text.

Their transatlantic counterparts (Bantam Books) went the other way. You can imagine the art direction delivered in JJ Jameson staccato: "It's called The Terror? It's set in the snow? Get a picture of snow, a coarse font and stick a layer of dust and stratch effects over the top. Done. Maybe put some blood on there, people love blood." It's an embarrassment not only to design but to the novel itself.

 

The situation is just as pronounced with Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series, where, like the other Scando crime novels mentioned above, the UK/Australian covers (Vintage UK) are designed by assembly line.
1. Find two (2) stock images:  One girl and/or shadowy figure plus one vague background.
2. Insert bold text title.
3. Add sticker effect "The next Steig Larsson" (The irony of this point is that Nesbo has been writing these crime novels since 1997, a full 8 years before the Dragon Tattoo was first unveiled).
4. Sell.

 

The US covers (Knopf books) still follow a pattern, but each is a clever design of its own. No stock images here- each cover is expertly designed by someone who had obviously read the manuscript. Or at least the synopsis. When I came upon the wonderful, frightening US artwork for The Snowman I was ordering through Amazon in no time. I'd seen the Australian edition around for years. (FYI- Nesbo is a much better writer than Larsson, his plotting dense and remarkable.)

To demonstrate how easy these crude template designs are to put together, here are two I prepared earlier:

Making these two covers took me 30 minutes. That's 15 minutes per cover. That's how long it takes an experienced designer to replicate the cover artwork for books printed in the millions. Surely they can get someone to take a little time, a little care, to put a decent cover together?

One final example here. This is perhaps the worst of the lot because its laziness isn't even a constraint of a templated style guide.

Erik Larson's simply incredible The Devil in the White City is a true narrative history about serial killer who operated at the Chicago World Fair in 1893, and for the US edition (Vintage Books) is given a classical treatment with a hint of menace. It's no grand work of art, but its obvious that a great deal of care has gone into the original design, as befits a book of such fine research.

The UK/Australian edition (Bantam Books, again) is another freshman photoshop attempt, not dissimilar to The Terror example above, but displaying perhaps even less imagination. This one simply uses the cheap floating head effect and combines it with a sepia wash to imply this all happened long ago. It's obviously another cheap job, and it insults everyone's intelligence.

Why is it that the United States, a country so often decried as the harbinger of doom when it comes to the arts, seems a designer's paradise when it comes to art to promote the written word? When they are accused of being anti-intellectual with a penchant for lowest common denominator, why are their designs so clever, so unique? And why, in a country where the language originates, are the UK  covers are so drab?
No doubt there's plenty of bureaucratic reasons, but none them are good enough, I say. No one wants to fill their bookshelves with the same dreary looking spines and covers. Surely, if we're going to spend the money to buy these stitched, glued bundles of paper, we want them to look as memorable as what we find written inside them.

I look forward to seeing this issue firmly dealt with on the The First Tuesday Book Club.