See for yourself: a cover can actually tell you a lot about a book | CBC radio

It turns out an old adage might be wrong — after all, you can judge a book by its cover, say authors and book designers.

“If you have this shirtless cowboy looking out at the field, his truck nearby, you know what’s going to be in this book,” said cover designer Brigid Pearson The Sunday Magazine.

Pearson, a New York-based cover artist, has designed thousands of book covers, including the paperback cover for the New York Times bestseller pachinko, a historical novel by Min Jin Lee. She says each genre has its own unique approach.

“I designed romance… It’s a very specific language,” Pearson said.

“These meetings are really fun when you talk about made-up cowboys. There’s a lot of talk about pecs and their shirt and facial features and their jeans.”

Whether it’s romance, thriller, or fantasy, the artists, designers, and writers who work on book covers state that they are more critical to the success or failure of a book than most people realize.

Author vs Designer

When artist Jaya Miceli approaches a new title, she has to capture a lot of information in one image.

“I’m really trying to get some sense or feel or mood of the story,” Miceli said.

Miceli, senior art director for the Scribner imprint at Simon & Schuster and a freelance cover designer in Brooklyn, designed the cover for the hit thriller The girl on the train by Paula Hawkins

For this book, Miceli said she moved away from a literal interpretation of the title and became more abstract.

“I tried to make it feel like that real person on the train, that girl who’s drunk and unreliable. And so the letters become double and not entirely clear,” she said.

Miceli said that sometimes what comes out of the design process is profound, like when she designed a cover for The finished thiefa thriller by Augustus Rose.

“The author said something along the lines of, ‘Thank you for designing the cover I never knew I wanted.'”

But Toronto author Naben Ruthnum said things don’t always go so smoothly and the relationship between writer and artist can be contentious at times. Ruthnum has written books like Curry: Reading, Eating and Running; hero of our time; and Find yourself in the dark.

And he admits that the author doesn’t always know best.

“You can’t rely on an author’s aesthetic values ​​to make the right marketing decision,” Ruthnum said. “I think that authors can often be very unfair to designers and think they know exactly what the book should look like.”

He said there’s often more involved than just the writer and designer. A sales team, a publicity team, and the book’s publisher are all involved in the process.

“These are valuable opinions because they’re the people who will interact with the public the most and see what cover will actually help the book sell,” Ruthnum said.

But Omar El Akkad said the design process was completely different from writing the book. The Canadian-Egyptian author of What a strange paradise says that writing is a very individual task, but what comes after it isn’t.

“All of a sudden you see someone else taking a work and maybe interpreting it in a completely different way,” said the Giller Prize-winning author.

“It was a reminder that this thing I had created was now going out into the world to be interpreted in many, many different ways.”

cover trends

Like the shirtless cowboy in a romance novel, or the double lettering The girl on the trainCovers can tell you what genre the book might belong to.

And repetition, Ruthnum said, can help.

“I was concerned that my thrillers in particular would look a step too generic, that they’d look like just another thriller,” Ruthnum said.

“What actually helps your thriller sell is its resemblance to two other books in the genre.”

The cover and title of a book are often a product of their time. There was a point where a lot of thrillers had the word girl in the title Ex girlfriend to The girl on the trainsaid Ruthnum.

One of the most popular cover trends are so-called blob books, which consist of titled abstract art.

Ruthnum reckons these types of cases are popular because they look good on a phone screen, but Pearson points to another benefit — cost savings.

“We used to be able to customize photographs and hire photographers, models and stylists, but there’s no money for that anymore,” Pearson said.

“But we can all go to our iPads and draw some typography and make some really pretty abstract backgrounds and they come out great.”

As seen on TV

Sticking an “as seen on Netflix” sticker or swapping out a cover for the book’s movie poster is also a popular trend these days. Ruthnum said it could give a book a certain stamp of approval.

“I think sometimes we get more perspective on these things as they get old,” Ruthnum said.

“If you have a copy Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence who has [actor] Peter O’Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia outfit on the cover, that’s a pretty cool looking book, isn’t it? Because it’s connected to something else now. It’s a neat cultural artifact.”

But not everyone is a fan of the trend.

“I’ve never liked it… I’ve never picked up one of those things and thought, ‘Oh, that was a great artistic decision,'” El Akkad said.

But El Akkad jokes that he’s willing to change his tune, for the right price.

“If it ever happens to one of my books I will come back to this show for the money involved and to tell you how much I love the new cover which is a movie poster and how much it means to me personally. And I will lie because they gave me a lot of money.”

And that gets to the root of the cover – money. A beautiful cover helps a book sell. That is Kevin Buckley’s experience. He has worked at TYPE Books in Toronto for 16 years and says it is very important to have a cover that catches the customer’s attention.

“It’s very important to choose things with your eyes when you’re looking at a table full of books for the simple reason,” Buckley said.

And El Akkad said that you can sort of judge the quality of a book by how it’s presented.

“If you pick up a book and it has a stunning cover, chances are a lot of people involved in that process were so moved by the book that they went out of their way and really tried to capture the essence of it.”

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Produced by Andrea Hoang.