Best Cover Competition

It's that time of year again. The Cover Cafe's romance covers competition results are in.
This week the the winner - next week you guess it the cringe contenders.

So the best of 2013 (follow links to get full list):

Avant Garde:

In First Place:

Lady of Ashes

Cover Cafe's Mary Alice says: "This cover is captivating. The gray, foggy, gloomy background gives this an other-worldly feeling to the cover. The stark black outfit of the woman, combined with the lily white hand and just a peek of her face makes her seem so frail and vulnerable. The lacy parasol and font give it a Victorian setting. And the red rose held behind her give it a romantic element. The red of the font leads me to believe she has something to hide. "

 Pieces For You is one of two covers tied for 7th place. 

I liked this one because the colours stand out and it's just that little bit different. 

Cora B. says: "I love the graphic style and the simplicity of the cover as well as the contrast between the bright blue and the black background. And that little red heart inside the phoenix is just perfect."

Contemporary:

 

In first place in the contemporary category:

Horizon

Okay, it's the loverly flame dress.

Elyse found humor in the flaming dress: “The dress, of course! It's mesmerizing! Although I'm a bit worried the heroine will be scorched, I'll assume she has special powers to protect her legs from those flames!”

 Two other covers in the contemporary category. 

 Water Witch (2nd place) has a lovely sensual feel,
and the colours on Carolina Girl (12th place) are so evocative.  

Historical:

First Place in the Historical Category:
Forsaken Dreams

I think it's the dress that wins this one as well. It almost looks like the inside of a paua/abalone shell. Plus there's all that misty mystery.

Of course, there was that stunning dress. Judy W. said: "This category is filled to the brim with women standing in beautiful dresses but I liked this one best. The smoky effect of the fog that almost matches the blue of her dress and the cloudy sky that looks about to erupt makes this cover really moody looking. Love it."

Clockwork Princess came in third, and I have to say I loved it. It's the ideal bookworm cover :) the magic of the book takes centre stage and the rest of the cover keeps pace.

Caro said: "The open book with the light coming out got me right away. That's what I feel every time I open a book - excitement to see a story shine."

Sheila S.: "There are so many things going on in this cover that make you want to read the book. Also love the dress she is wearing."

Two Image Covers

And finally the winner of the Two Image Covers Category:
Winter Queen

Michelle W. commented: “This is a beautiful image and it blends perfectly as a wraparound cover. No jolting change. It evokes the fantasy theme of the book. Lovely colour palette of purples used, from darkest almost-black to lavender and mauve, suiting the winter of the title...”

Human skin and book binding - what do they have in common?

I’ve done a lot of cover posts in the past: good covers, bad covers, weird covers. Never before, however, have I posted anything quite as macabre as anthropodermic bibliopegy. The what? The practice of binding books in human skin.

I know… creepy.

Although hardly a common practice it dates back to at least the 17^th Century. The technique was used to bind things like anatomy books, last will and testaments, and judicial proceedings (one story tells how the skin of a convicted murderer was used to bind the pages of his trial notes.)

Not only does this practice cover the outside of fictional tombs, it also slithers its way inside, especially in horror stories.

·         In H.P. Lovecraft's horror story "The Hound", the narrator and his friend St John, who are graverobbers, have a collection of macabre artefacts. Amongst them, "A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge."

·         In the Evil Dead series of films and comic books originally created by Sam Raimi, a fictional Sumerian book called the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis is bound in human skin and inked with human blood.

What brought on this rather disturbing topic? A recent article in the Guardian revealed the results of analysis by Harvard scientists who discovered the binding of the 17-century book, Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae, is actually sheepskin. (whew – on that one at any rate).

Two other Harvard library titles, however, are believed to be bound in human skin. A 1597 French translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses , which is annotated with the words "bound in human skin" on its inside cover, according to The Harvard Crimson, and Arsène Houssaye's mediations on the spirit, Des Destinées de L'Ame, which dates to the 1880s.

Is it just me – or does this one look like it’s got a face on the cover

People with books

Some very fun pictures. They might sound simple but in some ways they capture the joy of books.
New York Bookstore manager, Ellen Pullen, has collated an ongoing photo essay on books & the bodies that love them. The images show her and her colleagues posing with the books with which they work. Here is a small sample, see more here.

  

2014 covers

If you haven't been to Cover Cafe you should. Every year they run a competition for the best and worst cover of the year, they also look at the ongoing trends. I thought I'd give you a little update from them on where things are going.

Linnear has posted a new trend for 2014 (and she's a little peeved - this is not her favourite trend).
It's legs - that's right just legs.

She was a little more impressed with these two covers, feeling like they added a little something to the legs to get a better balance.

Then there's these two non-leg covers that I think stand a good chance of being nominated for best cover.
'Cruel Beauty' uses the 'staircase' trend, but with a lovely twist, adding lovely levels by incorporating the rose.

'Hidden Magic' has the 'woman facing away from camera' trend, but utilised differently because of the two layers of images.

I wonder what the rest of 2014 will hold?

Photo-shoot vs Photoshop

Okay, third time lucky, last cover post for a little while. Next week we'll move on to something different. This week I thought it would be fun to look at the little changes that get made to photos before they hit the covers.

I've tried to pic the changes, let me know if you spot anything else.

Dress darker, skin more tan, her ear ring & his hair's changed.

Skin more tan, changed her corset & dress.

Her ear ring, dress darker & now covers part of her arm, other than background that's what I spotted.

(I'm afraid I can't give you the original source of these photos, but here's my link)

Covers Children's vs Adult

Looking at some of the re-designed covers last week made me think of how covers get re-designed when books massively move readership. I'm thinking here of children's books that catch the adult imagination and are then given adult covers as well. This means the books can now easily sit in two places in the book store, and if an adult is reading one, they don't need to feel weird about reading kids books (and not to kids).

Harry Potter is of course the classic cross-over book.

This is probably more YA than true kids book.

Phillip Pulman's Dark Materials is an interesting one because although the main character is a child the author has said the book was never truly targeted at children.

The most recent popular cross-over success

Old cover vs new Cover

It's s little while since I've done a covers post.
Here are some covers that have been redesigned for re-release - which do you prefer old or new?

What's interesting about these two, is that even before the re-release (below), there was a change in approach. 

  Re-release (below) has a much more suspense feel. I haven't read these so I can't tell you if that seem like the right approach. However they are YA, to me the original (top) covers seem more YA, maybe they are trying to broaden there readership?

 Old (left), new (right), for images below

This is a redesign of a much older cover :) 

Cover trends

A couple of weeks ago I did a post on how covers are developed. A good link to that is Linnea from Cover Cafe (they bring us the best/worst competition each year), who has nice post on cover trends she's noticed creeping in for 2013. She was nice enough to gather examples (more in her post)

In summary, there appear to be 3 main trends.

1) staircases

2) Dress that go on forever

3) Fences 

Yes, I know on the last ones you've got to blink past the hot guys, but the fences are there.

How covers are made

I've talked about elements of book design before, like here where an artists talked about creating cover art, but what about the process from the publishers point of view. Below is a great little video on the process of making a book cover.

What I thought was interesting was that when the publisher is talking about the collaborative process behind cover design, the author is listed last, almost as an afterthought  This, unfortunately for the author, is very much the way things work.

I fill out a cover sheet at the beginning of the process (basic info like descriptions of hero/heroine, and a make a note of a few important elements of the story), that's basically it until the cover is complete. Only very famous authors get more say on their covers. The feeling within publishing is that authors know how to write, but publishers are the experts at marketing that book (sometime this is true and sometimes it's not).

I think a quote from Ilona Andrew is apt (unfortunately I can't find it, so I'll paraphrase). Basically someone was complaining that they didn't think the girl on the cover looked like they thought she should. Ms Andrews said that when readers see certain things on covers it gives them cues as to what sort of book it's going to be (romance/ fantasy/ thriller). The publishers understand those cue consciously  authors may not. Of course that's not to say publishers always get it right.

The other thing to bare in mind is that authors can moan like drains about their covers, but they are going to have to have a very, very good reason, because changing covers costs money.

Click the image & enjoy the video:

Sci-fi covers

I know the covers usually seen here are romance, this week we're going to take a walk in a different park, the sci-fi & fantasy cover fun park, where we'll ride only the worst rides, I mean covers.

Thanks to Good Show Sir for putting these and more, all in one place.

Did you spot it? Yes, that a purple fetus above the weird face.

Not surprised it's a virgin plant, she doesn't appear to have any genitalia.

I'm not sure, is he underwater, or on land? Either way he looks like he's about to trip.

Search the foliage for what's hidden. I don't mean things that would normally be covered by a Maple leaf, I mean the electronic gadgets.

Nice quote from the author on this one: "This is the cover to my first novel. It didn’t sell well. My editor/publisher blamed me, of course. This looks like a Harlequin romance. Even I wouldn’t have purchased this book." Published 1981

To be fair, Mr Cook, it may look a bit romance-y, but it wouldn't be a good romance cover either. It would just show up on worst romance cover blogs instead of worst Sci-fi cover blogs.

TV meets Harlequin covers

On The Bachelor, TV 'dating' show, a contest was set up to further winnow down the prospective ladies. This time the evening was going to be filled with romance, Harlequin style. The contest: a photo shoot. The woman who showed the most cover-chemistry was the winner. The prize: not the bachelor, not yet anyway, instead a three-book cover contract with romance novel publishing giant - Harlequin.

The covers:
"Seduced" is the winner, with Kristy, a professional model, as the heroine.
My opinion - of all the participants Sean is the most natural/relaxed looking. He looks like he belongs in the scene, for the most part the women look self-conscious & stiff. Of course, they're the ones with the most to lose/gain. It's not that surprising he looks at ease.

I confess this is not a show I follow, I was grabbed by the cover shoot idea. None-the-less this line is worth sharing. Full link to episode summary.

Sean: "I do consider myself a man"(well, that's good, because it seems to be an intrinsic part of the show's premise. Also, why consider? Why didn't he just say "I am a man."? I mean it'd be self evident, but less like he wasn't 100% sure.)