Suppose you were told that your book cover wasn\u2019t allowed to centre on an image of any kind?<\/em><\/p>\n Fine, perhaps you might be allowed a doodle, or watermark, or something clearly secondary to the actual text \u2013 but mostly, you\u2019d be allowed words, colours and nothing much else.<\/p>\n How would you feel?<\/p>\n I think most of us would feel disappointed. Text feels a good way to communicate data, but a lacklustre way of communicating emotion. And, since novels are mostly about an emotional journey, a text-only cover seems certain to disappoint.<\/p>\n And, OK, all my fiction covers use imagery of some sort. At times, that imagery has been very scanty indeed. The American cover of This Thing of Darkness features a cloud. That\u2019s literally all. The US version of Love Story, with Murders features a tree in a snowy landscape and, again, nothing else. (The tree, by the way, plays no part in the story. It just looked nice.)<\/p>\n But what you have to remember about really good cover designers is that they\u2019re really good designers. They\u2019re creatives. You have to tell them the outcome you want \u2013 roughly, \u201cThis is the genre, here is the emotion I want to generate, and here are some visual ingredients that may or may not be useful.\u201d<\/p>\n So when I talked to my cover designer about the Thing of Darkness<\/em> cover, the basic mission statement could have been reduced to:<\/p>\n I assumed we\u2019d have some shot of a trawler deck, tipped at some terrifying angle, with black water sluicing across the deck. Throw a crimey-title in a crimey-font across the image and \u2013 badda-boom \u2013 there\u2019s your cover.<\/p>\n And sure. I\u2019ll bet you a dollar to a dime that my designer explored covers like that. Dug out pictures of trawlers (from massive image libraries that have got shots of absolutely everything.) But in the end, a designer has to be guided by what works.<\/p>\n Try trawler. Does it work? Dammit. Not quite. Explore lighthouse. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite. Try waves-smashing-on-rocks. Does that work? Dammit. Not quite.<\/p>\n A creatively-led and experimental design process ended up with a cover \u2013 the storm cloud \u2013 that we hadn\u2019t anticipated, but worked just great. Here it is:<\/p>\n That cover, however, walked only halfway to pure abstraction; it didn\u2019t go the whole hog. Jonathan Safran Foer\u2019s Everything Is Illuminated<\/em>, on the other hand, used text. And colour. And nothing else. Here it is:<\/p>\n Ask yourself honestly: would this cover have been better with imagery? And what would the images have been? The book tells a heart-rending story of the Jewish experience of Ukraine \u2013 and of the Second World War. You could have had some sepia-tinted photos of some long-ago shtetl. But those images would have been reductive. They\u2019d have limited the book instead of hugely expanding it.<\/p>\n And ask yourself. What do you feel when you see the Everything is Illuminated<\/em> cover? The black and white looks sober, but the billowing colour keeps telling you: yes, there is illumination, it is joyous, and it is magical, and this book will open those doors.<\/p>\n Or look at this version of Ian Fleming\u2019s The Spy Who Loved Me:<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s utterly simple. The title already sells the book. The font and colours hint at the book\u2019s classic status. And the two singed bullet holes: they give you all the promise you need to pick the book up and starting reading. More would have given less.<\/p>\n I make these points because, oh merry folk of writing, I have news. And the news is:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written a book! And it\u2019s just been published!<\/strong><\/p>\n And not to beat about the bush too much:<\/p>\n You know what the book is \u2013 because you\u2019ve already read it!<\/strong><\/p>\n The book is called 52 LETTERS and it\u2019s a compilation of these weekly emails from me to you \u2013 but squidged into book form, drained of any residual marketing nonsense, and tied with a ribbon woven from rainbow beams and unicorn kisses.<\/p>\n Now, I have to say, I love writing these weekly emails and I loved-loved-loved squidging them together into a book. An email, inevitably, a bit of a throwaway thing. Even if you read one and it really hits a spot, the likelihood is that you absorb some of the message, then move on. Forget it.<\/p>\n A book just has more status than that. In the world, yes, but also mentally. Anything tucked up in a book is asking to be stored in a different way \u2013 read differently, absorbed differently.<\/p>\n So though I remembered writing all those emails, the actual book feels like a different thing. Different and better. I love it already.<\/p>\n But \u2013 gulp \u2013 to remove my (sober, black felt) writing hat and put on my (jaunty, yellow) marketing one: how the hell do you sell a book like that?<\/strong><\/p>\n I mean: it\u2019s not a book about writing, or editing, or publishing, or marketing. It\u2019s a little bit of all those things, plus a big fat helping of whatever nonsense is in my brain at the time.<\/p>\n And what kind of image do you put on the cover to say: \u201chere\u2019s quite a general, discursive yet practical and entertaining book for writers?\u201d<\/p>\n A pen? A typewriter? A quill? An inkpot?<\/p>\n If you browse the Authorship category on Amazon, you\u2019ll find books that make use of all of those icons \u2026 even though damn few of us actually use a pen, or typewriter or inkpot to write with. They\u2019re icons used by non-creative visual folks as a kind of angry shorthand: \u201cYou know that inkpot symbolises things-for-writers, so here\u2019s a book with yet another damn inkpot on it. Now buy it, OK?\u201d<\/p>\n So. What did we do, me and my numberless colleagues at Jericho Writers Publishing?<\/p>\n Well, the title we came up with \u2013 in the form it appears on Amazon \u2013 is:<\/p>\n 52 Letters:<\/strong> But the actual cover delivers a much longer title \/ subtitle combo:<\/p>\n 52 Letters:<\/strong> We liked that title because it told you what a rich, glorious, unembarrassed mish-mash the book contains. It feels like, at a textual level, a title that delivers the promise of the book.<\/p>\n But in a way, by choosing such a massively convoluted title, we were giving our designer an even bigger problem than he might have had to begin with. Not only was the book hard to pigeonhole, but we\u2019ve given him a title so long that it wouldn\u2019t even fit on Amazon\u2019s title box.<\/p>\n But you know what? That wasn\u2019t our problem. It was the designer\u2019s. The sort of problem he loves to solve.<\/p>\n We just threw a book description and our enormous title at our designer, Kelly Finnegan, and said, \u201cHey Kelly, here\u2019s a ridiculously long title for a hard-to-categorise book. The book is about writing and editing and all that, but it\u2019s definitely not a textbook. We think it\u2019s useful but entertaining, practical but discursive. And also \u2013 well, hell, we want it to be joyous and inspirational and anarchic and personal and fun. So please can we have a book cover that says all that \u2013 and looks incredible? Thanks.\u201d<\/p>\n I had no idea what Kelly would come back with, but he came back to us with this:<\/p>\n And honestly? I think that may be the best book cover I\u2019ve ever had<\/strong>. Any country, any title, any edition.<\/p>\n The fact is that, although Kelly\u2019s used just three main colours, a watermark version of me, and the text, the result delivers exactly the message we wanted.<\/p>\n What\u2019s striking is just how much creativity there is in the design.<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t tell Kelly to make the actual book title (\u201c52 Letters\u201d) small; he just did it. We didn\u2019t tell Kelly to put in the \u201cLove from\u201d before my author name; he just did it. And we certainly didn\u2019t tell him to use that sprawling handwritten font for the subtitle, but his decision to do that immediately signified something personal, creative and fun.<\/p>\n We sent some advance review copies out to people and got lots of lovely comments back, including this doozy from John David Mann:<\/p>\n\n
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\u00a0A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart…<\/em><\/p>\n
A year of advice on writing, editing, getting an agent, writing from the heart, the world\u2019s oldest book, marketing your work, battling copyeditors, the secret of style, probable vs plausible, what\u2019s up with Barnes & Noble, cannibalism, empathetic characters, writing phonetically and much more.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n