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 19th-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 19th
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.
