You can’t tell a book by its cover…or can you?

Today on Salad Bowl Saturdays we welcome Judy Alter who offers some more insight into the "wonderful" world of book covers. ~ Jim

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s an old adage that you can’t tell a book by its cover. Regardless, I’ve heard many an author moan over their latest book cover. Indeed, I have done some moaning myself. My first three New York-published books were from Doubleday, in their DoubleD western series which went to a list of subscribers (mostly prisons, I suspect). The covers were ordinary and unremarkable, not designed to catch the reader’s eye on a bookshelf. One was Mattie, about a woman doctor on the prairies of western Nebraska. I made a point in the text that her soddie was at the only tree crossing of the river for miles—three lone trees. So there it was on the cover—an English-style thatched cottage surrounded by luxuriant greenery.

But the worst was to come. My first “big” book was for Bantam, a fictional biography of Libby Custer. On the cover, Libby stood in knee-deep prairie grass next to a barbed wired fence; in the background was bare red dirt around a log fortress. Yikes. I wanted to point out that Custer was killed in 1876 and barbed wire was experimented with in the early 1870s but successfully demonstrated in San Antonio in 1876—there was no way Kansas was fenced while Libby was there.

Worse, one friend said Libby looked like Madonna in 19^th-century clothes, and another pointed out it was the ubiquitous West: Kansas in the foreground and Arizona in the background. In addition, there were no logs in the West for stockade fences (those were used in the East a century earlier) and Libby herself pointed out that she was surprised that western forts had no protective fence around them. But I was inexperienced, delighted to have a real trade book from a major eastern publisher, and I kept quiet…until it was too late.

One more horror story—I wrote a fictional first-person biography of  Etta Place’s years with the Hole in the Wall gang. A major point was that she rode with the gang on robberies, so what did the cover show? Men robbing a train, with no woman visible. Similarly, Ballad for Sallie, my story about a young girl who is a street orphan in Fort Worth in the late 19^th Century, featured a gunfighter mounting his horse, guns blazing on the new print edition. Go figure.

I was once at a conference where a book distributor—the kind who puts books in grocery store racks, etc.—said openly he lays the covers out and picks that way without ever opening the book, reading a blurb or any advertising copy. He surely thought he could tell a book by its cover—or that buyers would.

All that said, I love the covers for the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries--kudos to Kim Jacobs of Turquoise Morning Press who designs them. She sent one for Skeleton in a Dead Space that I vetoed immediately—a skeleton in red and black with dripping blood wasn’t the mood of the book at all.

She agreed the free-lance designer had missed it and designed the cover of the book herself. It was smashing and perfect.

Judy Alter 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Murder at Tremont House is the second Blue Plate Mystery from award-winning novelist Judy Alter, following the successful Murder at the Blue Plate Café. Judy is also the author of four books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a Big Box, and Danger Comes Home. With the Blue Plate Murder series, she moves from inner city Fort Worth to small-town East Texas to create a new set of characters in a setting modeled after a restaurant that was for years one of her family’s favorites.

Follow Judy at http://www.judyalter.com or her two blogs at http://www.judys-stew.blogspot.com or http://potluckwithjudy.blogspot.com. Or look for on Facebook at  or on Twitter where she is @judyalter.