There are some just awful, awful book covers on the market.
There, I said it out loud.
It’s not even mass market vs. middle market vs. Joe Schmoe and his inkjet at home, it’s everywhere. It’s a plague of publishing and one that I don’t understand at all.
Let’s get the disclosure out of the way. I am an artist, both traditional painting techniques and digital manipulations, and I’ve done some covers here and there. I realize there are plenty of books out there with just okay covers, and I’m fine with that. I don’t think every cover can knock it out of the park, else our fantastic covers would be the norm.
Being the type of person I am (obsessive psychotic), I have a fascination with art and various artists. I study quite a bit of art from both the past and present, and I visit numerous art and artist sites every day. There are sites like Deviant Art, CG Society, Concept Art, Flickr and even Facebook that have hundreds and thousands (even millions) of artists on them.
That’s where the mystery really deepens. Even if only 10% of the artists on any of the given sites are any good, and another 10% of those won’t charge you the cost of your first-born to do a cover for you, that’s still an enormous number of artists waiting to do work for you.
Let’s take Deviant Art for example. There are EIGHTY MILLION pieces of art on Deviant Art. If my math is even in the ballpark (remember, artist, not statistician), that means there are at least EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND decent works of art there. Surely one of them is better than getting some art from your cousin’s brother’s sister’s aunt’s boyfriend’s son’s best friend from the fourth grade.
I don’t really care if it’s a small press or massive New York publisher, you have no reason to put out an awful cover. The cover speaks for the contents, it’s your main selling piece and an important work in its own right.
I’ll stop in my tracks in a bookstore or stop scrolling online when I see
But I’ve seen cover after cover that looks like a kindergartner had fun with some Crayolas and the publisher loved it. Or someone who heard the word Photoshop and thought that mashing some photos together would be just awesome for their next cover.
Actually, I envision that going, “OH MY GOD! It’s PHOTOSHOP! We don’t need an artist OR a designer”! I’m also pretty sure that’s a big New York publisher I’m talking about, who’s art department loves Photoshop enough to turn even an easy idea into mush.
Before you hand out the typical, “but I can’t AFFORD a good artist,” let me just say one thing. That, as we say in the business, is bullshit (can I say “bullshit?” Captain Kirk did).
There are plenty of great artists out there who never get asked what their fees are, and also plenty of really good up-and-comers who don’t mind a smaller fee at the beginning of their career. Plenty of artists out there will do part trade and part cash too, either for books they might not have or even advertising if you also do magazines.
All you have to do is ask. Whether you are an author looking to pick an artist, or a publisher/editor, the worst that can happen (besides lots of giggling at what you want to pay, which is another blog) is that you don’t use the artist, and you move on to the next one. Price may be an issue, but it doesn’t hurt to try and work with the artist either.
In fact, that even gives them more reason to mention your books in other places, or speak highly of working with you. I know far more authors than I do other artists, and they always listen when I tell them which publishers are great to work for, and which are not.
So, ask not what a great artist can do for you, but what a stupid cover shouldn’t be doing for you in the first place.
Russell Dickerson has been published as a genre artist since 1999, in the UK, US and Australian genre press. He was honored to be included in the prestigious Spectrum annual (#9), and has worked on projects for the British Fantasy Society, Subterranean Press, Cemetery Dance, and many others. Along with appearing in recent issues of Cemetery Dance Magazine, he also created a number of illustrations for author Brian Keene’s Scratch. Visit his website galleries and blogs at www.darkstormcreative.com.
Related posts:
- It’s the economy, stupid
- Apex seeks talented artist minion
- Contest Announcement: Find art for our Apex Book of World SF
APEXOLOGY: Horror
One of my writing groups used to meet in a coffee shop in a large bookstore. Sadly we had to move our venue when they began closing the coffee shop early if they weren’t busy enough!
But back in the day we would often end our meeting by heading downstairs to the SF section and playing “hunt the bad cover art”. Boy were there a lot of choices…
Most of it was really awful figurative art where the artist couldn’t actually draw people very well, so that when you looked closely limbs appeared to be turning at impossible angles from bodies, or heads were far too big, or the movement they were supposed to be making was stilted and forced.
Second most common crime was hideous colour schemes that clashed in a nauseating fashion. And finally scenes that were just so ill-conceived and stupid you couldn’t help but laugh when you looked at them.
Sadly the bookstore is no longer there. But over the years the absolute worst we found was a cover in which a man was riding a dinosaur off to war. The man had a mullet haircut. So did the dinosaur.
This is right on target, Russell! I’ve seen some gorgeous covers recently — Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan, the limited edition version of John Scalzi’s The God Engines, and Cheri Priest’s Boneshaker, for example — and I have to wonder why all books, or at least more books, can’t have inspiring artwork like that. There’s certainly no shortage of resources out there.
Thanks for checking out the blog! There are quite a lot of fantastic works out there right now, and quite a few covers where they really did put a lot of thought into it. But even this weekend while I was at VisionCon I saw several at the local Borders that were terrible. Someone even had one of the really, REALLY terrible covers on his iPhone, and it wasn’t from a small press publisher either.
Along with what Rebecca said, I think composition is usually the worst offense of all, someone with no eye at all making covers. That’s too bad, there are plenty of great books that people skip because of how awful the cover looks.
I do want to note, since that last blog is up, that the one image above is “Wizard” by *KatjaFaith. They aren’t mentioned by name, but we do link directly to their Deviant Art gallery on that image.
This is so true. More than once I’ve seen good books tarnished with bad covers, usually involving photography and very bad photoshop skills. In fact, to add insult to other insult, more than one of the bad covers I’ve dealt with personally have been REISSUES, where the publisher had decided to bring out new editions with new marketing, and the covers were significantly worse than the originals…
I was actually thinking of eventually doing another one about Photoshop, something like, “Photoshop is not your wizard”. I don’t mind photography at all, in fact there are a handful of my own works that use photography as a base for the overall image (I call them “photographic illustrations” instead of my normal art).
But I think publishers rely on it too much, they think throwing a few photos together in the program is a magic bullet. They must think that they open the program and out pops Dave McKean, and that’s just not the case. You still have to have a real artist behind it, and it’s a disservice to all the great artists out there when you don’t.
I think, as an overall idea, reissues with different art aren’t necessarily a bad idea. An artist might have something different to say, or, in some cases, you might be marketing the book to a new and different group. But the cover should still be good.
Thanks for checking it out!
[...] my first two were “WTF? Really? You can’t just tell me who the artist is?” and “My God, What a Stupid Looking Cover“. Follow them monthly at [...]
I’m actually quite aghast at the horrendous covers that the big publishers sometimes put out. And there’s no greater horror for an author than to see a hideous cover for the book that they toiled over. I admit, a lot of authors probably shouldn’t have too much input on a cover – that’s not their profession. But it pains me to think that I worked my butt off on my book only to have it covered in ugly.
I was lucky to find a really good artist over at CG Society (Sven Rabe) whose monk I used when I did my cover. (Yes, I’m an author and I did my own cover, but I have “some” design background so I thought I could handle it.) But Sven’s work is what makes the cover. Not what I did. There are lots of inexpensive, talented artists out there. You just have to look.
[...] My God, What a Stupid Looking Cover [...]