Dispatches from the Front

I have, and will continue to make a big deal out of underwhelming book jackets, especially those that duplicate the use of stock photography--as if readers aren’t savvy enough to pick up on the fact. But we’ve heard in recent days from two different crime novelists who have had favorable experiences with art directors. The first is our own Linda L. Richards, who writes in her personal blog about having to persuade her publisher, St. Martin’s Minotaur, to change the front of her forthcoming 1930s private eye novel, Death Was the Other Woman (2008):

That first cover was amazing. Truly (though I’m clearly not unbiased) one of the nicest covers I’d ever seen.

A woman stood in an office, a gun in her hand, a cascade of golden hair falling over her shoulders, a ribbon of golden light on her face. A rumpled-looking man sat behind a desk, a butt in his mouth, pouring something strong-looking into a coffee mug. It was a gorgeous illustration, but for someone else’s book. I could see at a glance that these people weren’t from my book and that the clothes they were wearing were from 15 years or so after the events in Death Was the Other Woman take place. Someone had done a terrific job capturing the feeling of noir, of hard-boiled at the time when--for one reason and another--a lot of contemporary noir films take place. But the world happening on that cover wasn’t taking place in the early 30s. You could see that at a glance.

Fortunately, her editor at St. Martin’s was willing to present Richards’ argument to the art director, who agreed to have the same illustrator re-create the jacket art with more of a Sam Spade/Effie Perrine feel. (The elegant finished product can be seen above, but both versions are on display here.)

Meanwhile, J.A. Konrath had his own problems with the fifth Lieutenant Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels thriller, Fuzzy Navel (2008). “I like it,” he wrote to his agent, “but have a few small problems. The biggest is that my second novel, Bloody Mary, [also] had a blue cover. I’m worried that when future fans see the paperback on the shelf, they’ll believe they already read the ‘blue’ book, and miss out buying one or the other. How about purple as the background color?” After worrying for a couple of weeks that he’d pissed off his agent and maybe everybody else involved in bringing Fuzzy Navel to the reading public, Konrath received a revised version of his novel’s front, incorporating all of the changes he recommended.

So, what has the energetic Mr. Konrath learned from this experience? “If you have problems with a proposed cover, talk to your agent and calmly explain what doesn’t work and why. As the song says, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need ...”

Konrath addresses cover negotiations in two posts, here and here.