Cover
Story
by Ellyn Bache
Like most writers
with a string of books in print, I’m asked at almost every book event about the
covers.
Does the author
get a say in them? Sometimes.
How important are
they? Very.
And like most
writers, I’ve seen my share of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Three truly wonderful covers. One disaster.
Lots of in-between.
The Good:
Depending on the
publisher, and almost always with a big New York house, the author has little
or no control over the cover. My 2011
novel, The Art of Saying Goodbye, was
published by Harper Collins, which could have left me out of the design process
entirely. But my editor, Carrie Feron,
sent me each rendition, including the first one
. . . an impressionistic painting of two women, one with her head on the
other’s shoulder, being comforted as they sat on a park bench in floaty summer
dresses, with a soft-focus white building in the background.
My daughter said it
was pretty but looked like a lesbian love story set in World War II – not, as
was actually the case, a contemporary novel about a group of 40-something women
in an upscale suburban neighborhood, struggling with the illness of a longtime
neighbor.
Even before I’d
had time to object, Carrie rejected that first cover. She jettisoned several
more. She ordered some fine-tuning. The final product was remarkable. A drawing of three women in jeans walking
through a lovely but somber fall landscape, it captured perfectly the serious, powerful,
graceful journey at the book’s center.
The novel got good
reviews. It was chosen as an “Okra Pick”
by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. It was nominated for SIBA’s annual book
award.
How much did the
cover influence that?
Hard to say. But experience tells me there was certainly
some. Years before, my novel Festival in Fire Season had come out
with a dust jacket featuring colorful azaleas, a hint of fire, and the word,
“Sizzling” from the Publishers Weekly review
– visuals so intriguing it was hard not to pick up the book. The novel became a Literary Guild and
Doubleday Book Club Selection, important in those days. Later, my novel Riggs Park featured three girls holding hands, hair flying as they
ran through a summer landscape that perfectly conveyed happy friendships long
past. The novel was selected to help launch a new line of women’s fiction
The Bad:
The Activist’s Daughter is about a girl from DC who flees her
mother’s embarrassing civil rights activism by going to college in North
Carolina (The South! oh no!) in the fall of 1963. It was published originally by a small, well-respected
feminist press. I had no say in the
cover, but a warm, pleasant-looking version was sent to me while the book was
in production. Imagine my horror when
the final copies arrived, all black-and-white and drab tan, with an
illustration of a woman with her hair in a bun (in the ‘60s?) and an outfit
(floral blouse, straight skirt) from no discernible era, being dragged off by
what look like storm troopers. Above
that are my name and the title of the book, nothing else. On the back cover, in
tiny type, there’s a long plot summary, an excerpt, and some reviews but no
hint that this is a novel – much less
by a fiction writer whose earlier work, Safe
Passage, had been made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon – a film many
potential readers would know.
When I started
finding copies of the book in the social studies sections of bookstores, it
dawned on me that people thought the novel was a memoir.
Happily, the print
run soon sold out and the rights reverted to me. The reprint has a beautiful cover (in which,
yes, I did have a say) featuring the Old Well in Chapel Hill where the book is
set, placards to suggest the civil rights movement, and the words “A Novel”
prominently displayed. Over the years, The Activist’s Daughter has become a perennial
reading group selection for readers interested in the ‘60s. I’m convinced the new cover helped.
The Ugly:
Most book covers
are neither beautiful nor disastrous, even with glitches that can be maddening
for the author. The protagonist of Over 50’s Singles Night is named BJ
Fradkin – except on the cover, where it became BJ Franklin. The pastel pink cover
of Raspberry Sherbet Kisses features lovers
kissing while standing in an over-sized fruit bowl – so sweet that one reviewer
said the novel is light but not that
light (about a woman trying to hide the fact that she sees music and tastes
shapes – as some people really do). The
sales impact? I’ll never know.
If a book is a big
seller, the publisher will sometimes correct errors on the next printing. But if sales are low and the writer is
unhappy? In today’s digital environment,
most books are also e-books, which can stay “in print” indefinitely at little cost
to the publisher, which often opts to hold on to rights rather than reverting
them.
Often, the best a
writer can hope for is an editor sensitive to the visual journey readers take
before deciding to open the book and embark on the literary one. It makes a huge difference.
Ellyn Bache is the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including the novel
Safe Passage, which was made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon, a collection of short stories that won the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, and
The Art of Saying Goodbye, a novel that was chosen as an Okra Pick and SIBA Book Award nominee. Currently, she's most excited about an upcoming production next spring at Furman University of the musical comedy,
Writers' Bloc written with Joyce Cooper (who did all the music and lyrics). Ellyn lived for many years in Wilmington before moving to Greenville, SC. Her website is:
www.ellynbache.com
