It turns out an old saying might be wrong — you can judge a book by its cover after all, say authors and book designers.
“If you’ve got that shirtless cowboy looking out into the field, his truck nearby, you know what’s going to be in that book,” cover designer Brigid Pearson told The Sunday Magazine.
Pearson, a cover design artist based out of New York, has designed thousands of book covers, including the paperback cover for New York Times bestseller Pachinko, a historical fiction novel by Min Jin Lee. She says each genre has its own unique approach.
“I have designed for romance…. It’s a very specific language,” said Pearson.
“Those meetings are really fun, talking about made up cowboys. There’s a lot of talk about pecs and their shirt and facial features and their jeans.”
Whether the genre is romance, thriller or fantasy, artists, designers and authors who collaborate on book covers say they’re more critical to a book’s success or failure than most people understand.
Author vs. designer
When artist Jaya Miceli approaches a new title, she needs to capture a lot of information in one image.
“I really try to get a sense or a feeling or a mood of the story,” said Miceli.
Miceli, a senior art director for the Scribner imprint at Simon & Schuster and a freelance cover designer in Brooklyn, designed the cover for the popular thriller The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
For that book, Miceli said she moved away from a literal interpretation of the title and went more abstract.
“I tried to create that feeling of being that actual person sitting on the train, this girl who’s a drunk and she’s unreliable. And so the letters become, you know, doubled up and not quite clear,” she said.
Miceli said that sometimes what comes out of the design process is profound, like when she designed a cover for The Readymade Thief, a thriller by Augustus Rose.
“The author said something to the affect of, ‘Thank you for designing the cover I never knew I wanted.'”
But Toronto author Naben Ruthnum said things don’t always go as smoothly, and the relationship between writer and artist can be adversarial at times. Ruthnum has written books such as Curry: Reading, Eating and Race; Hero of Our Time; and Find You in the Dark.
And, he admits, the author doesn’t always know best.
“You can’t trust an author’s esthetic values to be the correct marketing decision,” said Ruthnum. “I think that authors can often be really unfair to designers and think that they know exactly what the book should look like.”
He said often there is more than just the author and designer involved. A sales team, publicity team and the book’s editor all take part in the process.
“Those are valuable opinions because those are the people who are interacting most with the public and seeing what cover is actually going to help the book sell,” said Ruthnum.
But Omar El Akkad said the design is process is completely different from writing the book. The Canadian Egyptian author of What Strange Paradise says writing is a very individual task, but what comes after is not.
“Suddenly you see somebody else take a work and they might interpret it in an entirely different way,” said the Giller-Prize winning author.
“It was a reminder that this thing I’d created was now going out into the world to be interpreted in many, many different ways.”
Cover trends
Like the shirtless cowboy on a romance novel or the doubled lettering on The Girl on the Train, covers can tell you what genre the book might be.
And the repetitiveness, Ruthnum said, can be helpful.
“I was worried that my thrillers, especially, would look a step too generic, that they’d look just like another thriller,” said Ruthnum.
“What actually helps your thriller sell is the similarity to two other books in the genre.”
A book’s cover and title are often a product of their time. There was a point where many thrillers had the word girl in the title, from Gone Girl to The Girl on the Train, said Ruthnum.
One of the popular cover trends is known as blob books, which are made up of abstract art with the title.
Ruthnum theorizes these types of covers are popular because they look good on a phone screen, but Pearson points to another advantage — cost savings.
“We used to be able to custom design photography and hire photographers and models and stylists, but there’s no money to do that anymore,” said Pearson.
“But we can all go to our iPads and draw some typography and make some really pretty abstract backgrounds, and they come out great.”
As seen on TV
Slapping an “as seen on Netflix” sticker or switching a cover out for the book’s movie poster is a popular trend these days, too. Ruthnum said it can give a book some cachet.
“I think sometimes we get more perspective on these things as they get old,” said Ruthnum.
“If you have a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence that has [actor] Peter O’Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia outfit on the cover, that’s a pretty cool-looking book, right? Because it’s now associated with something else. It’s a neat cultural artifact.”
But not everyone is a fan of the trend.
“I’ve never once liked it … I’ve never once picked up one of these things and thought, ‘Oh, this was a great artistic decision,'” said El Akkad.
But El Akkad jokes he is willing to change his tune, for the right price.
“If it ever happens to one of my books, because of the amount of money involved … I will come back on this show and tell you how much I love the new cover that’s a movie poster and how much it means to me personally. And I will be lying because they’ve given me lots of money.”
And that gets to the root of the cover — money. A nice cover helps a book sell. That’s been Kevin Buckley’s experience. He’s worked at TYPE Books in Toronto for 16 years and says it’s very important to have a cover that catches a customer’s attention.
“It’s very important for the simple reason that you’re picking stuff out with your eyes when you’re looking at a table full of books,” said Buckley.
And El Akkad said you can, in a sense, also judge the quality of a book from how it’s displayed.
“If you pick up a book and it has a stunning cover, chances are a lot of people involved in that process were so moved by the book that they went above and beyond and really tried to capture the essence of it.”
Produced by Andrea Hoang.
