More Books and their Covers

I’ll hope to have more from Karen Essex soon, but in the meantime I thought I’d chat a little more about this question of book covers and what you can tell from them. Since I work in the publishing business, I know that there are conventions for how industry folks want book covers to look. If a certain type of book has a certain cover look, then its audience can locate it more readily. Think, for example, of romance novels. They have a very distinct look, making it easy for readers to find them. They often have very colorful art that looks hand-painted, and the art often includes a clenching couple or a woman walking alone on the beach, or in the moors, usually in period costume. Or look at self-help non-fiction. It often has a lot of big type, making it look serious, like it means business.

At the moment, I have a pile of galleys for some forthcoming books on my desk. One is a novel called Made in the U.S.A. by Billie Letts (Grand Central Publishing). It has a dark blue sky on the cover, with points of stars in the distance, and a horizon line low down so your eye is looking up at a big glass Mason-type jar with fireflies in it. To me this cover says: folksy, quirky, somewhere in America that’s rural, not New York or California. Looking at the back cover copy, the book appears to have a few quirky kids as main characters, and take place in South Dakota. I guess I got the right message from the cover.

Here’s another novel: Sun Going Down by Jack Todd (Touchstone). Lots of yellows, reds, and brown tones on the cover, a drawing of a Conestoga wagon, lots of cattle and horses. Ok, American West, not too hard. And sure enough, back cover calls it “a sweeping epic about the American West” and puts it in the tradition of Little Big Man and Larry McMurtry. Here’s one more, for now: a new forthcoming novel by David Guterson. This one is mostly black & white, with what looks like a photo, or if not a photo then a very photorealistic style of art of a lake, frozen and snowed over, with footprints going across. A bit desolate, a bit ominous. But the snow is what strikes me most. Since Guterson’s big book was the bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, they’re obviously trying to make us think about snow!