Cover story that leaves authors out of picture
Financial Times June 21 2007
When Storm Thorgerson, the acclaimed designer of a host of ground- breaking album covers, published a book of his artwork earlier this year, he was relieved to be able to design the book jacket without hindrance.
The man behind the images for albums such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon did not find it so easy the last time he published a book. “I did a book called 100 Best Album Covers for Dorling Kindersley and the original cover was rejected by retailers,” he recalls. “I was so upset. How can a retailer know more than the artist about what suits a cover?”
As the music industry celebrates the most famous album cover in history this month with the 40th anniversary of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – designed by Peter Blake – the contrasting roles of authors and music artists when it comes to cover design look increasingly stark.
“In the music business, even if the band is not a big name, the record company is happy to let them choose the cover,” Mr Thorgerson says. “It’s beyond me why that isn’t the same in publishing.”
As well as authors typically bowing to the wishes of their publishers, publishing houses themselves have been paying increasing heed to retailers.
“The paperback is overtly commercial – it has to sell a lot – and the cover design does involve the trade,” says Joanna Ellis, marketing director at Faber and Faber.
When one UK bookshop chain told Matthew Kneale’s publisher Picador that it did not like the jacket for his new novel, When We Were Romans, published this month, it was changed without complaint. Mr Kneale, who won the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year for English Passengers, told the BBC that the retailer “felt it looked too much like a book for children and not enough like a book about children”.
Similarly, author Amanda Craig found the original cover for her last novel Love In Idleness rejected by US retailers because they feared it would offend the religious right: the cover featured an unmade bed. Time Warner Books changed it to something less redolent of illicit sex.
Book retailers tend to be conservative and to demand covers that fit into identifiable categories. Though publishers are reluctant to go on the record to criticise supermarkets and chains, privately they admit that getting new ideas past buyers is tough. “If Asda says it would order 100,000 copies with a different jacket, you change it. Simple as that,” admits the marketing and sales director at one of the biggest publishing names in the world.
In part, authors’ powerlessness lies in the fact that a jacket can sell a book. While musicians are sampled through radio play and as background music, a book sale depends on a reader being enticed to open its cover.
“If an album doesn’t achieve its sales target, the sleeve won’t be blamed,” says Orla Lee, head of marketing at Polydor UK. “With a book it is a different kind of impulse buy and the jacket matters.”
If retailers try to assert their power with record companies they receive short shrift. When Mr Thorgerson shrink-wrapped Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here in black plastic the reaction from the US retailers was hostile. “The US record company was furious about this and rang up in the middle of the night to demand we change it,” he recalls. “The UK record company said that is what the band want and the album went on to sell 16m.”
Terry Felgate, managing director of EMI Records, says: “The artist always has creative control and as a company we would always want to support that.”
However, the increasing power of televised book clubs such as that hosted by UK daytime chat-show presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan has given rise to new sources of influence to compete with the retailers. Amanda Ross, the producer of Richard & Judy who selects titles for its Oprah Winfrey-style book club, has become a powerful force in the industry. Sales of Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea rose by 350 per cent after it was reviewed on the show. And Ms Ross is challenging booksellers’ traditional caution over design.
“Last year I got to the stage that if I had seen another woman in costume with no head and the title in a slanty script I would have thrown it across the room,” she explains.
As she sifts through 700 titles for each choice, she feels she is in a better position than publishers or retailers to judge design. “We get a real snapshot of the publishing industry and often the covers are similar. Television is visual so we think in terms of what will catch the eye,” she says. Ms Ross’s emphasis on attention-grabbing originality will be music to the ears of Mr Thorgerson.
6 Responses to “Cover story that leaves authors out of picture”
One way that authors can (at least have a go at….) influencing their covers is to follow the advice in Susan Pages book How to Get Published and Make a Lot of Money (rather aspirationally titled, but actually very helpful and down-to-earth).
She suggests photocopying book covers that you love and hate and sending them to your agent and publisher – there’s no guarantee that the art department will take any notice, but at least they’ll have some awareness of what might make you cry.
With my book The Girls’ Guide to Losing Your L Plates – how to pass your driving test I knew it should have a chick-litty cover, but I didn’t want something that was too kooky-pink-bubblegum – thankfully was v pleased with the result!
(Incidentally, I like those historical costume head-chopped off covers .. but I know an awful lot of people who don’t!)
Maria
http://www.mariamccarthy.co.uk
Those headless bodice covers are hugely popular with the buying public. My sales have more than quadrupled since we’ve adopted that style – designed by Larry Rostant. The booksellers and supermarkets love the style and my career has taken off. Before that I was an award winning romantic author – a Betty Trask award under my belt and four shortlist nominations (as many as Philippa Gregory) for the RNA major award (I was longlisted the year you were judging, so you didn’t get to read Shadows and Strongholds) but the booksellers didn’t want to know. My publishers changed the cover style and bam! Suddenly I’m selling in quantities I’d only dreamed of before.
In my case, as well as my publishers deciding something had to be done, I also got a very good friend with qualifications in NLP to apply the technique to what was needed marketing wise to appeal to readers and I sent this to my publishers for consideration. They followed the directives and the rest is history (or at least historical fiction that is currently selling very well)
Very interesting piece, Danuta, thank you. Though it isn’t always the case that US publishers are force into greater prudery: the UK paperback cover of my novel The Mathematics of Love does involve a hint of unmade bed, but the US hardback is an unquestionably nude female back.
The headless-bodies covers send out a very particular message, which speaks to you if you like that kind of book: presumably that’s the idea. There’s a line in bodyless-child-legs, too, preferably including a falling-down sock, which goes with the misery memoirs but also the kind of literary-commercial crossover with a central child-figure.
But ’twas ever thus: anyone remember the bookshop tables piled with the white-with-watercolour of the Aga Sagas in the 80s? It started with Wesley and then Trollope and then Libby Purves and all their imitators.
Ah misery memoirs. A friend told me that at a meeting one of their editors mentioned a grim lit book that had been sent in. The usual stuff about child abuse that seems like a form of porn to me, but then again I don’t read it. Most of this publisher’s staff agreed with me, but they decided to take on the book because they were losing market share to rivals – ah the romance of publishing. They published it very cynically, just banging a picture of a crying, crumpled kid on a white background and gave it one of those silly names these books always have: Torn or Broken or Cut. It had no publicity or marketing, but to the publisher’s astonishment raced up the charts and has been one of their most successful books this year.
When I wrote ‘Rolling With The Stones’ with Bill Wyman we had a very interesting time with DK over the cover. The initial design featured a b/w shot of three of the Stones on the front cover, one on the spine and three on the back (they left off Mick Taylor altogether). The book’s title, The Rolling Stones Story, as they had decided to call it, was in orange.
At the meeting, when this jacket was presented, I ran through a whole host of reasons why it didn’t work, finishing withoOrange is not a rock and roll colour and very definitely not the Stones colour (that of course is red).
I was so unimpressed that I wrote a long email that night describing what I thought the Stones cover should ‘feel’ like. I finished it by saying.
So here’s what you do……..Get a large glass of Jack Daniels, crank up the stereo to eleven and play very loud
Gimmie Shelter
Street Fighting Man
Brown Sugar
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Sympathy for the Devil
Then immediately play Handel’s Zadok the Priest…………….
…………… after all five Stones tracks and exactly 1.22 seconds of Zadok the Priest start designing.
We got a better cover.
That is a FANTASTIC story Richard. I love it….I wish I had known when I wrote the original piece. Thanks for telling me. I think I might just crank up my Mac now and listen to that selection – sadly I have more work to do so will have to leave out the JD dx
Leave a Reply