Covers Gone Crazy
So apparently this is the week for cover art kerfuffles. We start with my own publisher DAW, who put out the anthology The Dragon and the Stars. This is an anthology of “18 original stories melding the rich cultural heritage of China with the imaginative realms of science fiction and fantasy.”
In DAW’s defense, I believe the budget for their monthly anthologies is significantly smaller than for original novels, which I suspect is why they tend to go with stock art for the former. And artistically, I like the look of this one. I just wish they’d gone with stock art that showed a Chinese dragon instead of a western one.
Cover number two comes from Bloomsbury, who you might remember as the publisher that whitewashed the cover for Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar. After much outcry from author and fans, Larbalestier’s cover was changed. Now Bloomsbury brings us Magic Under Glass. To quote the Book Smugglers review:
“Nimira is supposed to be dark-skinned! The book trailer captures that and is true to the book (check it out here) but the girl in the US covers is definitely white.”
It’s deja vu all over again.
Last but most certainly not least, oldcharliebrown points out the Baen covers from the Flandry books by Poul Anderson. Young Flandry came out last month. The cover for the forthcoming Captain Flandry is similar, aiming for that same demographic of young boys who for whatever reason can’t get real porn online.
I know many publishers have multiple imprints, but when did Baen launch their “Orgies in Space” line? I’m all for not judging a book by its cover, but even as a teenaged boy I don’t think I could have brought this one into the house. As a grownup wanting to introduce my daughter to SF/F, I’m embarrassed for my genre.
Click on any of the thumbnails for larger versions.
Please keep in mind that authors have little to no control over their cover art. Larbalestier was able to push for new artwork for her book, but she’s a fairly high-clout author and was able to rally reader/fan support. Generally, the author has little input into the cover.
So, what do you think?
Steve Buchheit
January 20, 2010 @ 11:20 am
Marketing and advertising is still stuck in the “good ol’ boys” days (this said as someone who has worked in the industry). They’ll have to be pulled kicking and screaming into new paradigms (because old paradigms still work to some degree and it’s dangerous to try the new).
Rob Thurman
January 20, 2010 @ 11:45 am
For my second series, I have a biracial protagonist, and I emphasized many, many, many times to my editor that I would be extremely upset if a pasty white girl (like me) showed up on the cover. At the same time I’d been around long enough to know A)what I wanted on a cover didn’t matter a rat’s ass and B)I have no klout. But I was pleasantly surprised when the cover model was close to what I’d written. So kudos to Roc on that one.
Rob Thurman
January 20, 2010 @ 11:51 am
PS As for the “Orgies in Space”…George Lucas was right. There is *no* underwear in space. Who knew?
Jim C. Hines
January 20, 2010 @ 1:38 pm
This is the Trickster series, I assume? Kudos indeed. It’s easy to slam on the publishers for messing up, but it’s good to recognize when they get it right, too.
Miriam Forster
January 20, 2010 @ 3:33 pm
Oh, good gracious! That is definitely not a Chinese dragon. I’m sad about Magic Under Glass too. While the cover is lovely, it could have been equally beautiful with an appropriate cover model.
I think the third one is the worst for me though. I’m a big James Bond fan and even I wouldn’t pick that up.
Sheesh!
Jim C. Hines
January 20, 2010 @ 8:59 pm
Over on my LiveJournal, there was a comment along the lines of “It’s sad when a cover can make James Bond look almost feminist by comparison.”
KatG
January 21, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
Apparently, the U.S. Magic Under Glass cover was designed before the flap over Justine’s Liar cover, and so rather than it being a case of Bloomsbury saying “let’s try this again!” it was more that they just decided they weren’t going to go and fix the same problem on a debut author. Or they just forgot about it, which is equally likely. I was more distressed to hear about Poison Study, a book I’d been meaning to read for some time now, which had a great cover, but which turns out not to actually have a white protagonist as depicted on the cover. And there were reports that Ursula LeGuin is still dealing with this problem for her covers as recently as the oughts. As for DAW, they may have been going for low budget rather than being feared of Chinese dragons, but if the big point of the anthology is that it’s Asian stories — if that’s its marketing hook — having a stock cover that doesn’t communicate any Asian motif at all is basically cutting your own throat from a marketing perspective.
What these cases seem to indicate — in addition to the news that the big booksellers seem to be peddling racist and such philosophies to publishers, or at least publishers are claiming they are — is a profound disconnect between marketing and editorial in fiction publishing. Here’s editorial acquiring books with non-white protagonists, Asian themes and re-packaging classics for a YA audience? or at least likely to get one, which is one plan, and here’s marketing going we don’t like the product you got so rather than market it, we’re going to package it as something else entirely because these other, entirely unrelated fiction books with those covers are selling. Marketing seems to be ignoring the fact that publishers get a lot of their money from their backlist, and they get it because authors build up audiences over time, so instead of trying to get buyers to stick with an author, they’re just trying to get whatever shiny look will trick readers into buying the book now and temporarily please the booksellers, thus severely limiting the number of buyers these books are actually going to get because they aren’t exploiting their actual marketing hooks.
I can’t help wondering if this isn’t related to other crazy aspects recently like Sarah Monette having to non-secretly change her author name for her upcoming works to “trick” the sales computer rating programs. Maybe the marketing people are going, “the pink covers are selling well, so Barnes & Noble want more pink, so slap pink covers onto every third book, whatever it is.” There doesn’t seem to be any actual marketing plan going on.