–d

The WebMage stuff is a series of mostly standalone books that they’ve done a great job of linking together visually by making each cover look as though it were an image on a laptop, with the keyboard and bottom of the screen included on the cover thumbnails at amazon. Since the book are cyber-fantasy and the lead character is a hacker/sorcerer with a laptop/goblin familiar this a fantastic idea. I’ve been really pleased.

And yes, semiotic analysis could and possibly has picked these things to pieces, urban fantasy and all the others. The result is probably not quite what the marketing departments would like to think . . .

And now that you’ve described it for me, I realize I have seen an awful lot of those isolated-chick-part covers. Those are ripe for deconstruction. Is someone writing a dissertation on covers yet?

A semiotician could make short work of the signs in play in those covers. I’m guessing that their similarity to other covers is not a drawback, but a benefit. The covers aren’t trying to explain the uniqueness of the content of any one book, but the opposite — Here is a book that the reader will find similar to other books he or she has read.

I think that’s true of every cover, though — it’s signalling the type of reader experience. SF is especially prone to (and I say this with love) the Big Dumb Object in the foreground — spaceship, ring, planet, whatever. For example, the cover for Paul Melko’s Singularity’s Ring just screams (attractively so) Hard SF. As it should.

And my book? (Fair’s fair, might as well try to analyse my own…) By _not_ having a chick, sword, or spaceship on the cover, it’s signalling on one hand that the book is not paranormal romance, high fantasy, or Hard SF — which is accurate — but on the other hand it’s got that fantasy typeface, the red demon lettering, the ominous tone in the color palette, the creepy abandoned farmhouse. It looks to me like Horror. I was hoping that it would signal, uh “literary fantasy” — but I think horror wins out here.

Quite a bit. <g>

(What they did, actually, was swap it out to match the cover for the sequel. Partly so the two books more obviously go together, and partly because Warrior and Witch appears to be defying the physics of publishing by selling more copies than the first book in the series, and all they can figure is that it’s got a better cover.)

As for the body part thing, yours with the hand is of a different kind. The real core of the trend is a certain kind of urban fantasy that shows some selection of a woman’s body between her shoulders and her knees, sometimes with half a face, sometimes facing away so there’s a whole head but you still can’t see her face. The original mockup for Doppelganger showed the whole figure, and I preferred it; when my editor sent me the final version, I actually thought the image had gotten cut off by accident.

I’m still not a fan of the partial-and-faceless approach; it sets off too many warning bells in the part of my head that views things through an academic lens. (I think it objectifies and depersonalizes the figure, though the idea is supposedly that this allows the reader to identify with her. I guess faces get in the way of that.) Also, the covers are starting to become indistinguishable from one another, with rare exceptions. And no marketing department wants that.

Marie, I had not idea about the lopping body parts trend! I guess the bodiless hand is only one more symptom. Byt the way, do you have before and after covers of Doppleganger? I’d be interested in seeing what they changed.

Di, you give me hope that I’ll continue to like my covers. I’ve heard several stories about people being unhappy.

Though since mine is a standalone, I didn’t have the extra level of difficulty of trying to tie them together visually. I agree– it’s about the mood and tone more than the adherence to the details of the story.

–Daryl

On the Crosspointe books, I mostly wanted a sense of the sea as an element on the covers and they apparently agreed. I really like these covers also. But again, I wanted something that marked them as together in some way (though they did put a banner on there that says: A Novel of Crosspointe). So I suggested a compass. They agreed and it’s on each book right behind the title.

But I have been very happy with all my covers. They aren’t all dead on the story, but they are close and more importantly, they capture the mood and feel of the story. I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed because the cover misleads about the nature of what’s inside.

I like the titling, by the way. And the farmhouse in midpainting. It’s a good cover.

Di

My experience with Doppelganger wasn’t so in-depth. I really wanted both protagonists on the cover, to play off the premise, but ran into Received Wisdom of Fantasy Art that said, there should only be one central figure. (Also the New Hot Trend of lopping off body parts.) Beyond that, my only real input had to do with visual style; I named off a few artists whose general look I like, and one I really, really hate.

Apparently nobody at my publisher was terribly happy with my cover, though, because they’ve redone it entirely for the re-release in August. I can’t say I’ll miss it terribly; sure, it was an okay cover, one I wasn’t embarrassed to hold up in public, but I didn’t exactly fall in love.

But really, I don’t pay attention to covers unless forced to. I know that they often have very little to do with the book. A pretty cover will not get me to buy a book I don’t want and an ugly one will not stop me.

I buy books based on recommendaitons, reviews, cover copy and first few pages.