Book Cover Designers Challenged

Book cover designers might want to mount up in order to participate in Edinburgh-based Floris Books’ second annual contest to discover “talented new cover designers and illustrators.”

The Prize challenges amateur designers and illustrators across Scotland to design the cover for a new edition of the classic Scottish children’s novel The Hill of the Red Fox by Allan Campbell McLean. The book will be published by Floris Books -- complete with a cover designed by the winning artist -- in autumn 2015 as part of their Kelpies range of Scottish children’s novels. 

The winner of the Kelpies Design & Illustration Prize will receive £250, and will work with Floris Books to produce the book's final cover, which will have worldwide exposure.

First published in 1955, The Hill of the Red Fox is a classic Cold War spy novel set on the Isle of Skye. Floris are looking for an action-packed winning design that will bring the book's sense of intrigue and mystery to life for a new generation of readers.

You can read more here.

Worst Book Cover Ever?

As all booklovers know, you’d have to go a long way to pinpoint the very worst book cover of all time. This has become even more true since self-publishing started to boom and, at the same time, everyone’s nephew got Adobe InDesign.

So there are some truly terrible covers out there. It’s tough to decide which is the very worst. And then? The Korean translation of a western classic gets a cover that pushes it way up the list.

Though the cover for one of the Korean translations of The Diary of Anne Frank would be horrific for any book in any language, there’s something really revolting about this nubile and seductive young woman on the cover of the heartfelt scribblings of the girl who died in a concentration camp after writing her innermost thoughts and dreams in her diary while living in an Amsterdam attic during the period her family was being hunted by the Nazis. 

As Kotaku, who shared the photo, points out:

Usually, covers of The Diary of Anne Frank feature black and white photos of its author, Anne Frank. Or, you might see tasteful illustrations. You don’t usually see photos like this! 

So while this is probably not the worst book cover ever, between the inappropriate illustration and the typo in the English portion of the typography (we can’t proofread the Korean, so we’ll just have to assume it’s okay) we have to vote this one up pretty high. (Or low, as the case may be.)

Best Crime Covers

Over at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, editor J. Kingston Pierce has revised a Rap Sheet tradition. Readers there are looking over and voting on the best crime fiction covers of the year. As Pierce says:

You will find 15 fronts from crime, mystery, and thriller works published last year. All of them, I think, are special in their own ways, whether it’s because of their typographical excellence, their bold imagery, or the manner in which they suggest the intensity of drama to be enjoyed between their covers. 

Take a look through the spectacular selection of covers and cast your vote for your favorite.

Book Covers: What’s Hot, What’s Not

Are book covers a fashion item? David Middleton, January Magazine’s art director and a seasoned cover designer in his own right says, “Yes. I suppose you could look at it in that way. There is even an argument that the seasonal nature of the industry plays a part.”

Not coats or sweaters, of course: books don’t actually need to stay warm. But, like clothing and cars and other things highly influenced by sales numbers, “the visual vernacular is always being pushed towards change.”

Part of this, Middleton insists, has to do with a Holy Grail-style search for a cover that will sell any book anytime to anyone. “And, of course, everyone knows that bestsellers aren’t created by any single thing.” No sense, for instance, wrapping the proverbial sow’s ear in a silk purse. Still, “in an environment as competitive as contemporary publishing, every element is being pushed as far as it can go.”

All of that might explain some of what The Guardian’s blog is on about while looking at this year’s book jacket fashions. Some of it is plain fun. For example, they break down the covers of the latest books from some very popular authors and define the jacket style just as one would when writing about the newest offerings from fashion designers. For example, looking at a current trend to entirely type-based covers, The Guardian offers:

Look: pure text - just name and titleExample: Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieAlso worn by: Julian Barnes, Gillian FlynnWhat it says: bow down - author is such a god that usual visual accessories would be vulgar

Nine trends are examined in this way. And what’s not hot? The Guardian has that covered, as well:

On the way out are yellows and pastels; the curious short-lived vogue for showing only women’s feet or arms; images of furniture; ostensibly hand-illustrated covers (eg The Art of Fielding) - and the retro look in general has become passe.

Except of course, when it isn’t. After all, Middleton reminds us, all the book industry ever seems to need for a trend to start is a big seller. “I don’t think it would take very much at all to bring all those feet and arms right back.” ◊

The Best of the Worst Book Covers

The Guardian books blog sallies into a field of best ofs with a discovery of a blog that specializes in worst ofs. Or, as the Guardian itself says, “The best crap book covers”:

I’ve said it before and I'll say it again: I love crap book covers. And my favourite romance blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books has just pointed me in the direction of a glorious new source of awfulness: Lousy Book Covers (tagline: "Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn't mean you SHOULD").

Alison Flood’s Guardian piece is here. You can find the Lousy Book Covers microblog here.

Book Covers: The Worst of the Worst

The squeamish and faint of heart should not read further: what you’re about to see can’t be unseen.

As our constant readers know, we have a deep interest in covers at January Magazine and we’ve talked about them a lot over the years. That is to say, we know what a bad cover looks like, so we don’t necessarily agree with So Bad So Good that the covers featured are, in fact, the “10 Worst Book Covers In The History Of Literature,” a lot of them are super bad. And some of them are just covering really stupid books. (Something had to.)

Consider some of the titles: The Big Coloring Book of Vaginas (no, really) and The Best Dad is a Good Lover (the mind reels). And, as January art director David Middleton wants to know, “When was it ever okay to put the word ‘retarded’ on the cover of a book?”

So Bad So Good shows us all 10 truly terrible books and covers here.

Happy Belated to Killer Covers!

For various crazy reasons, we completely missed wishing a happy second birthday to J. Kingston Pierce’s Killer Covers blog. Pierce, who is editor of The Rap Sheet and senior editor here at January, has a passion for terrific cover art, as almost anyone who reads either January or The Rap Sheet already knows. Like so many of the projects Pierce has involved himself with, Killer Covers began from a place of passion. As Pierce says:

It was all my own damn fault, of course: I was interested in discovering and writing more about the authors and artists whose work I displayed. I didn’t want to simply compose extended captions about each book face, or put up the book covers without any explanation, the way several other blogs already do.

Killer Covers has evolved into an exploration and celebration of great crime fiction covers. Congratulations, Pierce! And thanks for creating this terrific resource. Killer Covers’ birthday post is here.

The Top Ten Typefaces for Book Design

Want to know the top ten typefaces used by book design winners? FontFeed did the research:

The American Association of University Presses holds an annual Book, Jacket & Journal Show which catalogs the best in book design and exhibits it around the country .... We ordered catalogs from the last three years of the show and tallied the typefaces used. The results won’t shock you -- each of the top ten is a tried-and-true classic. Yet there is so much more great type out there begging to be used for academic text and titling. So, along with the champions, I’m recommending a few less common alternatives that offer just as much readability, function, and beauty for today’s books and journals.

FontFeed shares their findings here.

Best Crime Fiction Cover: Cast Your Vote Now!

With only one more week of voting to go in The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Novel Cover of 2010 competition, three books have established clear leads: Shuichi Yoshida’s Villain, Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut, and Kelli Stanley’s City of Dragons. Also coming on strong are Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian and Helen Grant’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.

If you have not already cast your ballot for one or more of the 10 entries in this competition, isn’t it about time you did so? After all, this contest will close at midnight on Wednesday, January 5, with results to be announced soon after that.

Procrastinate no longer, folks. Vote here.

Best Crime Fiction Covers 2010

Can you judge a book by its cover? Popular opinion says no, no, no! Even so, it’s pretty hard not to, especially when there’s so much terrific book art around.

Because Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce cares enough about cover art to discuss it on January Magazine’s sister publication fairly often, he’s made it an annual practice to collect the best of what he finds and then allow readers to vote for their own favorites:

Ever since 2007, those of us at The Rap Sheet have closed out each year with a look back at some of what we considered to be the finest crime novel covers of the previous twelvemonth. It’s our small way of acknowledging the often-unheralded graphic designers who, though they don’t write the books we read, nonetheless play a vital role in encouraging us to pick up those works in the first place.

Honestly? We’d do something similar for January if only we could find the energy! Meanwhile, this year’s crop of great crime novel covers went live on The Rap Sheet this morning. You can peek at them and then let your preferences be known here.

Cover Version

Over at The Rap Sheet, we often see posts about copycat book covers, and the issues of judging a book by its jacket. The Sunday Observer takes a look at the importance of book covers and how they translate internationally:

What you are trying to get across on a cover is the essence of a book, quite an ambiguous thing," says Nathan Burton, a British designer who created the striking cover for Ali Smith's The Accidental, based on an image of a dead woman. "Designers in different countries read and interpret the fiction in different ways." It doesn't quite explain how Germany arrived at silhouetted dancers for House of Meetings, but "the germ of an idea can come from anywhere," says Burton. He points to the Swedish cover of The Accidental, on the surface a starkly different treatment – "but there's a photograph of a girl, bold sans serif type... You could argue that they are born out of a similar thought process."

There are colder business reasons for creating jackets that differ by territory, says Julian Humphries, head cover designer at Fourth Estate: "Different sales channels have different sensibilities." It can be hard to pinpoint what exactly these sensibilities are – "It's a cultural thing," he says, "as taste-driven as different countries eating different things for breakfast" – but broadly speaking, literary fiction is an easier sell in mainland Europe than in the UK or the US, so publishers there can be less overt in their attempts to grab the attention of customers. "In Europe you often see book covers with simple images and plain type, and that sells books for them," says Burton, whose colourful design for A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz stands in stark contrast to the black-and-white German edition. "The UK book market is more competitive, all the covers in shops shouting: 'Buy me!' We have to put on a bit of extra spin."

The US, meanwhile, tends to signpost its literary fiction more than the UK, says Humphries. "With their version of Wolf Hall, for instance, they picked out the history bent of the novel much more. Theirs was a great cover, and won prizes everywhere."

Why don't publishers, then, replicate covers that have been a success abroad? "It does happen but it's quite rare," says Humphries. Megan Wilson, an art director at Knopf Doubleday in New York, says that American designers are sometimes asked to look at British jackets, "as an example of something that works or doesn't, but we are rarely asked to use them directly". Burton tries to avoid looking at alternative covers if he's working on a book that's already been published. "It can take you off on odd tangents. It's always best to work from fresh."

There’s more to The Observer’s story and it’s here.

Incidentally, The Sunday Times reports that the three biggest-selling paperbacks in the UK in April were Volumes I, II and III of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium Trilogy, which last week held the No. 1, 2 and 4 positions. (The Korean, U.S. and UK covers of the first book in that series are shown above right.)

The Tiger’s Wife

Given all the ridiculous hoopla of the last few months pertaining to star golfer Tiger Woods’ marital infidelities, his subsequent disappearance from the spotlight, and then last week’s public apology to his Swedish model wife, Elin Nordegren, I couldn’t help stopping when I came across the cover of this 1951 Gold Medal novel by Wade Miller (aka Robert Allison Bob Wade and H. Bill Miller).

The fabulous jacket illustration of a man chasing a swimming woman was apparently the early work of Clark Hulings, done more than five decades before the U.S. media decided that Woods’ own pursuit of lovely female flesh was fair game for coverage. And author Miller’s 179-page novel really has nothing to do with Woods’ sexual antics. Its plot synopsis reads:

A novel of a soul-devouring woman. Ernest Hemingway, in his famous story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” has one of his characters say: “American women are the hardest in the world, the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive, and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened.” The Tiger’s Wife is the story of such a man and such a woman, played out to the tempestuous end. It is Wade Miller at his superlative best.

Still, one can hardly look at this paperback front (which was changed, unfortunately, by the third printing) and not be immediately reminded of the golf pro’s woes.

Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2009

Over at The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s sister publication, editor J. Kingston Pierce has announced the finalists in that blog’s annual contest for the best crime fiction covers. Says Pierce:

Every year since 2007 (which seems like a rather long time ago just now), The Rap Sheet has hosted an annual “Best Crime Fiction Covers” competition. We’ve gotten in the habit of keeping track each year of book jackets that we think stand out from the crowd of egregious copycats, trendy duplicates (this year’s overused theme being shadowy running men), and downright lame fronts that substitute ominous imagery for honest reflections of the stories contained within. By the end of each twelvemonth, we usually have a file of 25 to 30 distinctive jackets. Then we trim that down to a mere dozen covers we think are the best of the breed.

If you’d like to vote for your favorite, you can do so here prior to December 28, after which the winners will be announced.

Thoughts on Books and Tea Parties

In his usual stylish fashion, J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet socks it to ‘em with a trenchant post on death, taxes and book covers:

I’ve been waiting for months to post this book jacket. And I could hardly have picked a better day than this: April 15, aka Tax Day in the United States. While political right-wingers and FOX News talking heads, upset at President Barack Obama’s campaign to repair the sour U.S. economy left behind by his predecessor, gather in ragtag “Tea Parties” at various points around the country to protest progressive taxation, government spending, the supposedly detrimental ideas students are taught in college (as if ignorance were really bliss), and the general fact that one of their own isn’t in charge anymore, everybody else will be filing their tax forms or feeling smug that they already completed that annual deed weeks ago.

The title of this book comes, of course, from a saying attributed to U.S. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” However, Franklin makes no appearance in the novel.

Pierce’s full post is predictably engaging and it’s here.

Do you just love that cover to death? There’s more where that came from. Pierce has been collecting them at his Killer Covers blog. Along with -- you guess it -- still more trenchant observations. Kill Covers is a must stop because, as the blog tells us, “it’s what’s upfront that counts.”

Annual Book Show Picks the Best

We’re sorry not to have been able to get to the 23rd New York Book Show last Monday, the 24th of March. Nearly 600 publishers, writers, book production personnel, book manufacturers and guests descended on the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street. The stars of the show were the 170 winning books, jackets and covers. With so many winners, we won’t list them all, but you can see them on the Show’s Web site.

The New York Book Show is sponsored annually by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York. While the Book Show is the highlight of the organization’s year, they are an active group with interests in both literacy and the art of the book. You can learn more about the Guild, including how to apply for membership, here.

Your Coverage May Vary

One of the things you’ll have noticed if you spend much time either here or at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, is that we give a lot of thought to book covers. This is especially true over at The Rap Sheet, where editor J. Kingston Pierce has turned the whole matter into something of a fine art.

So it was with some amusement today that I came across this short piece on the Abe Books Web site entitled “30 Novels Worth Buying For the Cover Alone.”

And are they? Well, you decide. Personally, there is no book I would buy simply because I thought the cover was good. (Even though, on the author side of things, I consider myself very lucky because my publisher does a killer job on the covers of my books.)

In fairness, though, some of the books included in Abe Books’ 30 would be worth reading even with stinky covers. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (although I must admit I’ve seen it with covers I like better than the one shown here.)

In any case, if you think it’s fun to see what books others think are well covered, the piece is worth a peek. (And a peek is all you’ll need here: it’s very brief. Not much reading required.)

Still hankering to revel in the art of the book covers? Pay attention to anything J. Kingston Pierce has written on the topic. It’s turned into something of a hobby for him. He even recently developed a blog called Killer Covers (“Because it’s What’s Up Front That Counts”). Also, check out his ongoing -- and engaging -- series on copycat covers. It’s astonishing. As well, for the last couple of years, he’s been rounding up the very best in crime fiction covers and asking readers to vote on same.

We’ve Got It Covered

It’s no secret that J. Kingston Pierce, January Magazine’s senior editor, as well as primary perpetrator of The Rap Sheet, has a thing for covers.

Not long after we launched The Rap Sheet as a standalone publication back into 2006, Pierce began his campaign of holding copycat covers up to the light. All of those articles are vastly entertaining, and are collected here.

In 2007, it seemed somewhat natural when this passion for all things coverlicious led to Pierce collecting the best of the covers he’d encountered during the year and allowing readers to add in their two cents. Yesterday on The Rap Sheet, Pierce unveiled the covers he figures are this year’s best from the world of crime fiction:

Several of us have been keeping track of the artwork that has graced this genre’s book jackets over the last 12 months, and we have finally winnowed down (from an original set of some three dozen candidates) what we believe are the 12 most distinguished covers produced in 2008. Undoubtedly, there will be readers who disagree with our selections, and say that other choices should have been made. Indeed, those of us who put this list together pushed our individual sets of contenders, and in the end none of us got everything he or she wanted. A few nominees were especially hard to set aside, but in the end, we arrived at a rundown of book jackets that work well in terms of artwork, typography, and message.

If you’d like have a peek and add your own vote, you may do so here.

Copycat Covers Continues

More than two years into his crusade to suss out and expose all the duplicate covers in bookdom, Rap Sheet and January Magazine editor J. Kingston Pierce is astonished that “vigilance and increasing negative publicity seems not to have deterred publishers in the least from trying to save a few rubles by using stock images -- even when those photographs and illustrations have already appeared on the covers of other books.”

This time out, Pierce brings us surprising visual duplications on books by top selling, debut and international authors, while letting us know that, with help from his readers, “my mission continues.”

The most recent Copycat Covers expose on The Rap Sheet can be found here. Find all of them archived here.

Seeing Double

Over at The Rap Sheet, my colleague J. Kingston Pierce is now almost two years into his amazing project tracking down copycat covers. In fact, I’d venture that no one can put a candle to his collection. As Pierce said in his first copycat covers piece back in May 2006:

How many times have you spotted a novel or other book that duplicates the cover photo from a different work you have seen or read?

The causes of this trend seem pretty obvious. Corporate publishers, looking to enhance their bottom lines by producing more and more titles, and trying to capitalize on marketplace crazes … are prone these days to hasten the draft-to-finished-book process. As a consequence, they’re susceptible to using the same art as others. The fact that they can use identical artwork results from the creation and consolidation of stock photography companies, notably Corbis, Getty Images, and JupiterMedia, which make it easy and relatively cheap for publishers to find high-quality images that designers can use in putting together book covers. Also in the mix here, I suspect, is a calculation by publishers that their readers simply won’t notice that they’re employing the identical book jacket art (or even titles) that others have used before.

His latest two installments come less than a week apart and again present a surprising list of original cover art infractors. These two most recent copycat cover articles are here and here but, if you have the time, ride with Pierce through the whole catalog. It’s an eye-opening journey.

Split Decisions

I’ve commented infrequently in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s crime-fiction blog, on the habit of unknowing or cost-cutting book designers reusing the photographs employed previously on the covers of other volumes for their own new work. However, there seems to be an even more ubiquitous trend hitting publishing houses of late: what we might call “split covers.” These are book jackets that use not just one photograph, but two, often separated by titles and author names. Start paying attention, and see just how many of these split covers you spot while traipsing through bookstore aisles.

I can’t decide whether the proliferation of these divided fronts is due to the inability of their designers to choose between a couple of evocative shots, or because they’re simply trying too hard to attract every conceivable reader with their imagery. But in any case, there’s an abundance of these split covers decorating the mystery and crime-fiction shelves.





(And no, you’re not imagining that the jackets from Charlie Huston’s Already Dead and Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open bear a remarkable similarity. This is indicative of designers resorting to the use of cheaper stock photos.)

The same design concept has been adopted by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, which is beginning to reissue Ross Macdonald’s 18 novels featuring Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer, beginning with The Way Some People Die (1951) and The Ivory Grin (1952):



A number of fiction works, both hardcover and paperback, have been dressed up with divided jackets:





However, this trend is by no means confined to the fiction racks. I’ve found even more examples of it elsewhere in bookstores:









What’s the likelihood that pointing out these duplicative designs is going to propel art directors and publishers to pursue any different creative direction than they’re already following? Not great; somebody, somewhere has undoubtedly determined that split covers sell, which is why we see so damn many of them. And isn’t imitation supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, anyway?

On the other hand, how many of these divided book covers can there be on shelves and end caps before buyers stop being able to tell them apart easily? Once marketing departments get wind of that trouble, you can bet we’ll be on to the next book cover design trend fast.