The importance of cover art cannot be underestimated as a hook equally the title. At least that is the contemporary assumption. Sir Allen Lane and his brothers formed Penguin Books in 1935 using only a simple two-tone colour plain cover. The design was added to with a penguin logo but otherwise the covers remained plain for decades. Don’t be fooled. This was so successful because of a) the original price of only 6 pence, b) the books were mostly reprints of already well-known authors and classics, c) they stood out precisely because of the lack of gaudy designs. The irony is that these days Penguin use much more colour and fancy designs on their covers. This allows other publishers to sneak in with a surprise plain cover such as WHITE by Kenya Hara.

Other than such gimmicks readers casually browsing online or in a bookshop are influenced by images that reflect their favourite genre. Spaceships and astronauts for scifi, galleons for historical naval novels, navels for erotica and weapons with blood for crime.

The tricky thing is to design a cover that stands out within your genre. The cover for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Anthony Burgess, 1962) uses a stylistic impression of a futuristic gothlike face of the sinister main character, Alex.

 

On the other hand beauty is represented by the historical fantasy, PERFUME (Patrick Suskind, 1985).

 

 

 

A clever book cover I saw recently is VIEW FROM THE SIXTH FLOOR (Elizabeth Horton-Newton, 2014) which features a surprising new take on the JFK assassination. The cover has a view of the Book Depository but in three shots (get it?).

 

 

 

For the ARIA TRILOGY I was lucky to see an art gallery at FantasyCon of Andy Bigwood’s art. He produced all three covers. We met and discussed what themes were crucial to each volume then Andy came up with a variety of options for each cover. For additional publicity on twitter, facebook, etc I use other related images such as one of a virus to represent the ARIA bug. Even better I was pleased to receive this strip cartoon based on the central premise from Benedict Martin. Marvelous. He says, “…the cartoon hit me early on in the story. I think it was when Jack brought in KFC and his wife said it was her turn to make dinner. It’s funny how that works.”

See for yourself if his cartoon hits the spot:

ARIA smarturl.it/1fexhs

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/nelder_geoff

 

Geoff’s UK Amazon author page http://www.amazon.co.uk/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY

And for US readers http://www.amazon.com/Geoff-Nelder/e/B002BMB2XY