Because it bears repeating

[james_davis_nicoll]

Authors generally have very little control over the covers of their books.

Also, and I have to admit I've never actually heard anyone say this but the evidence appears to support this hypothesis, most publishers' art directors not only don't know any people who are visible minorities, they don't know about people who are visible minorities. This is probably because most major publishers are based in New York and if there's one thing Friends and Seinfeld taught me, New York is surprisingly monotone.

Comments

[catherineldf.livejournal.com]

Nice! :-)

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

This is probably because most major publishers are based in New York and if there's one thing Friends and Seinfeld taught me, New York is surprisingly monotone.

It's true. We bleach ourselves once a week.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This is why I like living in an ethnically diverse city like Kitchener. We even get ethnic diversity tourists looking to enjoy our diversity (at least, I assume that's why the roaming Mormon missionaries ask where the Hispanic part of town is [1]).

1: It's not impossible: I have heard of tourists going into Amish churches in Lancaster to snap shots of the exotic Anabaptists (who turn out to be surprisingly hostile to this for some reason).

[kowh.livejournal.com]

Related to this, some people seem to unable to comprehend that you can have a significant minority population without having ethnic enclaves.

Mind you, having a [insert ethnic]town might at least mean you could get decent [insert ethnic] food. Toronto's far better than K-W for access[1] to any decent ethnic food[2].

1: Toronto does have the advantage of being almost 50% minorities, vs. the 15-20% of K-W.

2: Except perhaps german.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

First time I've even *seen* my covers is on the finished book. The ARCs come out with gray covers.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

And now I'm trying to remember which publisher has the ARCs with the gray covers. Roc?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Ace, for me.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Ah yes--that was the other option. That means Roc ARCs are the orange ones. (I have the same publicist contact for Ace and Roc, so I often have a difficult time remembering which one is which.)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

No cover flats? Used to be fairly common one got to see cover flats considerably before the book came out. (That's already too late to change anything, of course.)

[seawasp]

Baen actually has permitted me to speak with the artists for the covers and even offer input. This doesn't mean that I control what's on them, but I at least know that the artist does know what I was thinking about various aspects of the book. I'm pleased with the cover for Grand Central Arena even though it isn't, precisely, what that scene is like in the book, and the cover for Threshold is lovely, too.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Giving sane authors a chance to communicate with sane artists seems awfully smart. (Some authors, and perhaps some artists, probably shouldn't be allowed into the program, though.)

[seawasp]

Any author who will get bothered by Their Vision Not Appearing On The Cover should not participate, definitely.

And Baen does still send cover flats. I have one here in my cube at work for GCA.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

The common bad pattern I've seen is getting hung up that some particular thing is "wrong", and not being able to get past that. It doesn't actually matter whether Loiosh has the right number of legs on the covers, and it DOES matter that Steven has consistently had really great covers on the Vlad novels (and he knows it, and doesn't bitch about the variances to the descriptions in the books).

The idea that the cover is not an illustration, but an advertisement, makes it easier to understand a lot of things. And so many covers are CLEARLY not illustrations at least of any specific scene.

(In fact it makes it easier to understand whitewashing. It is nowhere near enough to make me accept whitewashing, and I am extremely doubtful that the theory under which it's desirable strictly for sales purposes is valid.)

[(Anonymous)]

How many legs is Loiosh supposed to have? Did I miss some reference to Jhereg limbs in one of the books?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Two. I can only easily lay hands on secondary sources, but this is one I think well of.

So here's their information on the animal jhereg.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

What's the Threshold one like? Odin prominently displayed?

The GCA one is actually pretty good, at least in terms of related to the book. The Boundary cover (aside from the obvious bit which I will not make a joke about) actually had, in retrospect, not too much to do with the story since that scene never actually was there.

EDIT: Oops, never mind, just saw it at Amazon. My, that's a mighty fine looking interplanetary spaceship there in the background. Pure engineering genius, I have to say. NASA should look that designer up.

[seawasp]

The scene in Boundary EXISTED, sometime in the past, or something like it did or could have. It just wasn't shown "on camera".

Yes, I love the GCA cover.

Indeed, complete genius, hopefully they can find the guy who did the originals.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Last book, I got electronic files of the cover rather than actual flats. The .jpg showed up well after the ARC. And as you say, far too late to act on any gripes. The one time I tried to get an actual inaccuracy in the back cover copy changed, it hung up the works on release of the cover to Amazon, etc. for online promo . . .

And probably earned me a black mark with the editor.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

I receive cover art well before the ARCs come to me--my second book comes out at the end of August, but I posted the cover art in my blog earlier this month. My editor emailed a big jpeg to me.

However, I'd already seen the image on Amazon.com. They get it before I do.

[kate_nepveu]

Chad got a jpg not cover flats for his pop science book, and got a minor change made to it.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

"New York is surprisingly monotone."

What??????

I live in NYC and have for many years. My friends are anything but monotone, and most are multi-lingual, and most are also mixed race. Puleeze.

That publishing, television and Hollywood is predominately still white, is another story. I worked in publishing for a long time as well. Despite even having a Puerto Ricaña as head of one of their juvenile imprints, the editors and publishers insisted that latinos don't read.

Blame the industry, but don't characterize the city that way.

Love, C.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think you missed the glyph of sarcasm there.

Maine now, Maine is monotone.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

In your distant land, do they ever speak of that which we modest Canadians call "sarcasm"?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The "Friends" and "Seinfeld" reference nailed it for me . . .

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

New Yorkers do not do sarcasm.

Nor yet irony.

Neither satire.

Love, C.

[redbird]

Maybe not in your part of town; upper Manhattan can do sarcasm and satire in at least three languages.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Um, I was acknowledging that I missed the sarcasm in the entry ....

Maybe I was doing so in a fourth language though?

Love, C.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Not to make a defense for missing the sarcasm it's just that I've got a lot on my mind with the Haitian catastrophe, and all that has to be done, since, well, we can do some things.

But I'm also deeply depressed about everything to do with this country these days.

Love, C.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

It's an error I find entirely comprehensible; I've certainly made it myself.

No damage was done, you have acknowledged it, and we should be able to move on with no significant loss of status for anybody involved :-). I hope.

Yeah, this 2010 thing is not starting out to be as much better than 2009 as many people had been hoping.

[(Anonymous)]

He was being sarcastic in response to your sarcasm! "Puerto Ricaña" was the tell.

NM

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I knew when I saw this post that there would be at least one person unable to read for irony.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I think it helps to view book art as a label, more or less equivalent to the art on a box of cereal. Although the logical extension of this is equating the author to the machine that dumps the sugar-coated cardboard pellets into the boxes at the factory. The contents likely bear little resemblance to what's presented on the cover, even disregarding the presence of an anthropomorphic cartoon tiger. I passed the "paranormal" section of a B&N a few days ago and every single one of the covers was redone to look like a romance book (not that your typical paranormal/UF fare wasn't presented as a bit titillating to begin with.)

Is there an easily available reference for professionally published authors (self-publishing doesn't count, nor comics) who either do have control over their cover art or provide that art themselves?

I've never been to New York but it's just drunk Irish cops with muttonchops dodging hatchets thrown by mafiosos, isn't it?

[kate_nepveu]

It helps _what_ to view book art as a label?

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

The cognitive dissonance some people feel at the idea that authors have no creative control over their book covers?

[kate_nepveu]

Okay. (It was that or the idea that one might object to the whitewashing of a book's cover, you see.)

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

You can make a dust cover even for a paperback out of Kraft paper; no need to find some whitewash.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

All my oldest paperbacks have such a cover. I think I stopped the practice around 1966, however, as being too much trouble for the new increased rate of paperback accumulation.

Hadn't occurred to me to use it to hide the covers. Most of the Modesty Blaise books I own have covers in that category (the books themselves I think are quite good, and not well represented by those covers).

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

My blood pressure. Perhaps the previous poster meant it helps theirs.

[gohover.livejournal.com]

That was very funny! But of course, the cereal-dumping machines are like printing presses. Human beings design the cardboard-tasting food that is mass-produced and dumped into boxes. I know one of them - he works for a major food company you have heard of, he has a PhD in chemistry, and I know he is proud of his edible creations - if not for their taste, then for their new-fangled lack of saturated fats, for their inability to ever spoil, etc. I'll ask him if he cares what the art on the box looks like.

Also: he explained to me that the final taste of his foods is determined by market research. He said his team often creates foods that meet all the mass-production criteria, yet actually taste quite interesting -- and of course, these foods don't test as well as blander fare. I know there is an analogous dumbing-down process for movies, but I'd like to imagine that never happens with SF novels. :-)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Wife used to work for an artificial flavors and fragrances multi-national. They had a taste-test lab for artificial strawberry flavors, and one of the choices nailed "sun-ripe wild strawberry" on the nose. She voted for that one.

That choice only got one vote in the poll.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I wonder what I would have voted tasting blind? In actual produce, real sun-ripe wild strawberries are amazingly much better than the normal agribusiness product.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

They also had an artificial maple flavor that nailed pure maple syrup, including the "mouth feel" of the sugar. It lost out, but at least it got more than one vote.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

One of my regular Christmas presents is real maple-sugar candy, and I'm still going through this year's box. Mmmmmm!

It's fascinating that they can make artificial flavors better than the ones they use. Depressing, but fascinating.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I think the "better" part is a question of what people have actually experienced -- more people have tasted pure maple syrup, which can be found in most grocery stores these days, than have ever encountered a wild strawberry. You pretty much have to hunt and gather those yourself.

And the number of people on taste-test panels who have met either One True Flavor seems to be a minority.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

But I did not grow up on real wild strawberries, and yet instantly preferred them when I got the chance to sample them. (At a restaurant in Rome, actually, is the first time I know about; didn't even have to gather them myself.)

And in fact I grew up on "Log Cabin" syrup most of the time, and strongly preferred real maple syrup when I could get it.

At least for me, familiarity is very much not the issue.

Ah; did they by chance ask the people "which tastes most like real strawberries?" rather than "which tastes best"? That would make familiarity much more of an issue. And would probably be a stupid mistake, unless their experience with wording the question shows otherwise.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I can't help but imagine that whoever concocts the more outlandish flavors for potato chips really enjoys their job.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

In some sadistic way, yes.

I have strong evidence that Smurf designers sometimes have enjoyed their work.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I don't remember if I actually ate any of the Every Flavor Jellybeans, but I enjoyed contemplating how the flavor chemists finally got to leave off making Fake Cheese #594 and try their hand at a New-Mown Grass for a change.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

"I passed the "paranormal" section of a B&N a few days ago and every single one of the covers was redone to look like a romance book (not that your typical paranormal/UF fare wasn't presented as a bit titillating to begin with.)"

Does that mean they're over the "hot girl with tattoos viewed from the back" cover?

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I haven't been in a B&N recently, but if they're calling the section "Paranormal", it probably won't include any Urban Fantasy.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

most publishers' art directors editors not only don't know any people who are visible minorities, they don't know about people who are visible minorities

There. Fixed that for you. After all, if the editor doesn't give the art director info about characters who might be on the cover being PoCs the art director isn't going to decide on his/her own to give someone dark skin. What these controversies mostly make me wonder is what the editors are thinking to be so unclear about the characters the book is about. The art directors sure as hell are NOT creating covers based on having read the MSS; someone is giving them bad info, and those someones need a kick in the pants.

The Friends and Seinfeld monochromatic NYC is also seen in stuff like The King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, Sex in the City, etc. Apparently, when the Huxtables moved out of NYC they were the last/only black family who had lived there...

[(Anonymous)]

I can't believe I'm actually commenting on this, but I'd like to stick up for King Of Queens as not being monochromatic. Deacon, who works with Doug is African American. He is in practically every episode, and his wife has also appeared a lot.
PLUS, Lou Ferrigno has been a frequent guest star, and as we all know, Lou has a history of being noticeably green.

And since I've opened my yap, Everybody Loves Raymond is, IIRC, set on Long Island which in real life has several areas that are indeed so monochromatic that it has occasionally been a problem.

-- RDaggle

[dharawal.livejournal.com]

Way back in the FidoNet days, I was in a echo called SF, in it there was amongst other authors such as Pat Wrede, Pat Cadigan, and a few others, the author John DeChancie, he wrote the damn good Castle Perilous series.

It was a running joke that the cover of one of his books featured a FBT (Frigging Blue Turtleoid) when there was NO turtleloid creature at all in the story, or in ANY of the Castle Perilous books.

The FBT became the symbol of all those WTF moments you get when you look at a book cover and go 'wha?'

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Joel Rosenberg, John M. Ford, Pamela Dean Dyer-Benent, Guy Kay, and still more. Yes. Good times.

[wrenn.livejournal.com]

*nod* And lets not get into the 'media tie in' books... Most if not ALL of their book covers are 'WTF' moments.

[wrenn.livejournal.com]

*nod* And lets not get into the 'media tie in' books... Most if not ALL of their book covers are 'WTF' moments.

[sillymagpie.livejournal.com]

Lately I've become convinced that genre books are using the same stock photos of male and female models, heavily Photoshopped, for all their covers. They all look more or less alike. Or perhaps they're just using the same stock figures from a software program. :/

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Ah; you don't know about Poser, apparently.

No need for actual models.

[sillymagpie.livejournal.com]

I know about Poser, but I ran across it so long ago I wasn't sure anyone still used it. I don't know what people are using in 3D animation these days. :/

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Huge user base, both in the amateurs who use it and the professionals who don't admit they do.

(Admission: I do.)

The problem with Poser is that because you can do something straight out of the box, a lot of people simply do stuff straight out of the box and thus it is instantly recognizable (and usually pretty amateur hour or straight-out dire) because it looks like all the other renderings straight out of the box.

There is a core group of users who can push it really far and do really good work, and there's a bunch of us who have been screaming at other users who refuse to use all the newer tech that's under the hood which can make things look a lot better. Again, the main problem is that there are so many users who simply produce generic crap, and they're the ones who gives Poser it's reputation.

I've done one book cover with it, which because of the instructions I was given on what they wanted, severely limited what I could do with it (not to mention it was two versions back).

[dharawal.livejournal.com]

Ahh yes Poser, apparantly a lot of romance novels use Poser figures, and so do a lot of the publish-yourself places too.

I can spot a poser figure from a mile away, I was only passingly average at using Poser, but at least I TRIED to do the best I could.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Can't speak to all publishers, but one author did have some input to the cover of her book; One of my photos. Right off Flickr. Without even asking for permission, never mind pay me in advance.

Kathleen Popa added one of my photos to a gallery on Flickr entitled "Photographs that inspired my novels", a still life of pomegranates and pine cones; I was touched and flattered, until I did some research and found that it was on her novel, as well.

I contacted her, and she said that she had shown the picture to her publisher, and they used it. She forwarded my letter to the art director, and the next day I received an email, with an offer to pay, and an apology.

after a bit of wrangling over the amount of money and the wording of the contract, I soon had a check in hand that enabled me to buy a refurbished Canon Rebel T1i.

Kathleen sent me a copy of the book, and we follow each other's flickr streams. It's all good!

Moral of this story? Writers, make sure your cover art is properly licensed.