Cover art redux

Oct 24, 2013 12:46

Harry Connolly is interesting about cover art, sub-genres, and pinning down what is "real" literature.

He posts three covers, one of which is to The Postman Always Rings Twice, which sits on literature lists, as the other two examples very plainly aren't. I've always thought of that novel as unexamined male gaze trash, tightly written trash, but ( Read more... )

literary fiction vs. genre, behavior, cover art

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anonymous October 26 2013, 03:22:39 UTC
Now I actually like the lurid pulp style covers of the 1930s to early 1960s (and sometimes beyond e.g. with gothic novels). I'm not sure why those covers appeal to me, since I'm too young to have read books with such covers back in the day. But they do. I have tried to evoke those old lurid pulp covers with the covers for my Silencer series, which is surprisingly difficult to do, unless you can afford to commission an illustrator.

I actually like the cover of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" as well. The art deco typography is interesting, though I don't see much difference between "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and forgotten pulp novels from the same era. I've never liked that novel, though that's largely due to the fact that I share a first name with the femme fatale character, her lover shares a first name with a classmate of mine and neither of us ever got to live it down after someone in my highschool class watched the early 1980s film adaption on TV.

The thing about cover art is that it's determined by genre, by trends (i.e. all the black and white kissing couples or hairless bare-chested youths on certain indie romance covers) and also by national tastes. For example, a good crime fiction or thriller cover in Germany looks completely different from what is considered a good crime fiction or thriller cover in the US. US and UK covers for the same books regularly look different.

Cora

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sartorias October 26 2013, 04:43:21 UTC
That's interesting about covers for similar genres looking completely different. I wonder how the various elements signal differently--cultural differences?

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anonymous October 26 2013, 12:28:16 UTC
Sometimes it's just that one book with a particular type of cover catches on and soon you find similar covers all over the genre. For example, one publisher put a detail of a historical painting on a plain black background on the cover for a Henning Mankell crime novel that became a bestseller in Germany, so soon you saw details of historical paintings on all sorts of crime novels and thrillers. It was a really lovely look, too, but Americans and Brits wouldn't even recognize those books as crime fiction or thrillers.

Sometimes it's also marketing. The German "A Song of Ice and Fire" covers look uncannily like the covers for Ken Follett's popular historical novels "The Pillars of the Earth" and whatever the sequel was called. I guess they believe that both will appeal to similar readers.

Some of it is also simply cultural differences. For example, I tend to find a lot of American covers considered good or appropriate for their genre incredibly ugly and buy the British edition whenever possible, because the covers are closer to my tastes.

Cora

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sartorias October 26 2013, 13:41:09 UTC
I know a lot of Americans who also prefer British covers!

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anonymous October 26 2013, 21:34:25 UTC
That's another issue, that preferences are not universal. For example, I know that Tess Gerritsen vastly preferred the German Henning Mankell style cover (i.e. a cover with a historical painting) to the US covers of one of the Rizzoli and Isles novels and believed the cover was the reason why the novel in question hit the bestseller list in Germany but not in the US. She might be on to something there, especially since the edition of the novel I have has a dreadful cover. No, even if it is a thriller or suspense novel, I don't think the cover should look like hospital waste.

I also think that both marketing folks at publishing companies as well as the buyers of the big bookstore chains often operate on the basis of old data. Hence the persistence of horrid clinch covers on romance novel, even though every romance reader I ever met hates those covers.

Indie writers aren't much better. If anything, some of them are even more conservative with regard to cover choices than publishers ever were.

Cora

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