judging pixels by their, uh, cover.
19 Mar 2009 02:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouA few days back a friend was contemplating the cover design for her next story. With my bookseller-cap on, I naturally had feedback but then held back (partially, at least, because I wasn't up to sitting still long enough to type much, haven't been for awhile). But seeing the alternate covers got me thinking, or at least just scrutinizing cover art in ebooks a bit more closely.
A day or so later I came across this note in a publisher's submissions guidelines/faq (edited for more generic version after seeing roughly the same sentiment at three different publishers):
We do not allow authors to provide cover art... We have a staff of artists who produce all our cover art... we're proud of the quality of our cover art.
Which I find amusing in some respects, because some of those companies are the same ones with the covers for which my only reaction is, "my goodness, that's unfortunate."
Granted, the majority of publishers (not all, but the majority) have at least moved away from computer-generated Poser covers, long may those burn in whatever hell you please. But a fair number make mistakes that to me seem pretty basic: low contrast, funky-ass font faces, static poses, and some of the most uninspiring and clueless compositions (or lack thereof). Yes. Right. Goodness, that's unfortunate.
Which is especially amusing, considering that I've had my share of friends who've commented they'd never buy a romance, no matter how good, because the by-the-numbers cover art just screams lurid!bosom!heaving!crap! Yet here I am in the privacy of my own home contemplating various works and thinking, I would never buy that book, I mean, the cover is just so freaking pathetic that I can't even imagine clicking on it.
(That's particularly sad considering that one of the writers I really like, James Buchanan, has somehow been saddled with some of the most atrociously bad cover art I've seen in a long time. It's like some five-year old got loose with a stack of magazine clippings scanned at low-quality, and thought to make up a cover by cutting and pasting in Photoshop. It's that bad, and yet Buchanan's novels are sharp and good and fierce. Why doesn't someone of Buchanan's calibre rate a cover artist like Anne Cain, anyway?)
Just around the same time, I came across mention of an online series of workshops (now closed, sadly) that were hosted/run by several of the big names in ebook coverart. There were at least links to the artists' works, and I was struck by how gorgeous many of them were -- and yet something indefinably different from standard, off-the-shelf, book cover art.
(No, I'm not going to post a litany of the Worst Covers Evah, because it's not the author's fault, but it's their name on the book that may end up associated with the snark. It's their publisher's fault for not having the decency to hire better freaking artistic directors -- not artists, because some of the art can be decent but without proper layout/design, it's defeated by bad font, bad type, bad contrast, bad composition. Bad publishers! So, no litany of snark.)
Frex, here are four covers of paperback books, chosen at random from the compilation I posted awhile back (so they remain in my gallery and thus easily snagged again, lazy me).
Now, here are three of my favorites from Anne Cain and graphicfantastic, and resized to be approximately the same as the Amazon-snagged images above:
It wasn't until I realized that one of those books in the second group was designed for print that it dawned on me: the ones for print have a lot of itty-bitty words cluttering up the cover. Mention of the author's other bestsellers, one blurb, maybe even a teaser (or is that a second blurb?), the title, the author's name, and some other stuff I can't make out.
Even so, in the second group, that one designed-for-print has some tiny letters but it's minimal. Definitely not quite cluttery, not nearly as much as the covers in the first group. I mean, this makes sense; normally, when I hold a paperback and look at teh cover, it's a fair bit larger than the 200px high version you're seeing on your screen right now (or that I see when browsing ebooks).
That means there's a bit more leeway, possibly. I mean, if the first group of covers were among a selection of ebooks, I might take a second look, based on the cover design tempting me, but it's a fair bet I'd ignore them as I do the print-versions sometimes scattered in among ebook versions (a habit I honestly can't stand from some publishers, because then it looks like they're selling two or more versions of so-and-so's latest -- I'm there for ebooks, show me the freaking ebooks, and set the print versions elsewhere and stop confusing me! ... okay, snark dialing down again).
Of course, a second look at the first group of images might also be purely for the sake of laughing with my inner twelve-year old. Because the first one, in that top group? What pops out isn't the red-on-blue (a nice contrast for print) but the white in the center, making the title look like OOD LINE and ahahahah what a stupid name, my inner tween shrieks. (And then I look again, realize, and move to the next book now that I feel stupid myself -- ohh, so that's what it says, okay, FINE.)
The second one? Red on dark gray to black is catchy in the 3D world, but not quite as clear, so it's harder to make out the title without staring intently for a second or two. The third looks like 'Embracc the Nigot' from the extra curlicues of the c and e, and the way the upper bar of the h in 'night' gets lost in the line of the woman's dress. The last one would work except I can't for the life of me make out the author's name, lost as it is with light color on light background and barely-there outlining.
Lesson: it's a lot easier to mess with contrasts and font-styles when the final version to be used as basis for judging is a version at least eight inches high by five inches wide (or greater). When it's on a computer screen that could be of any variation in color-setting, brightness, contrast, who knows what the user will see.
(There is a special place in my list of annoyances for those publishers who show the cover and note the author's name underneath -- but not the title. I can't always figure out the title when the contrast or composition or font-style is unclear. I don't always order immediately, but come back and ponder again, and it's awfully hard to find a book upon your return when the author's name was in itty-bitty link under the image, and the book cover was fuzzy or unclear in some way. "Well," I say to myself, "it looked interesting, but who knows where to find it, so never mind.")
I've also noticed that some publishers cleave closely to the kinds of styles you see in four specific genres: romance, science fiction, westerns, and epic fantasy. It's like a type of framework that must bracket the front image -- like the author's name and the title get their very own frames, and the artwork has to fit inside this imposed frame, as well.
Some e-publishers do that for specific lines/brands -- you see that style, you know, this is one that's based on X theme, or is Y length, or has Z content. The only one who seems to have nailed this style is Torquere, whose short-story classes (short, medium, novelette, novella, etc) have a specific repeated -- but very spare, simple -- graphic. Most book covers do not have a picture of a highball or a martini on them, so it's pretty obvious it's not a cover per se, so much as a stock indication of story length or theme.
The majority of other e-publishers, though, have series-covers that look remarkably like a 'regular' bookcover, and it's just re-used. I end up wondering if I'm looking at the same book I was five minutes ago, or maybe that was another book, who knows. The design is so close to regular book cover design (at least of epub ilk) that I realize I'm not thinking, 'oh, dat's a graphic image' but thinking, 'book cover!' -- and to see six 'book covers' that are all identical is to see the first and visually, if automatically, skim the rest. (This is complicated further when some publishers separate the epub and print versions and list them both on the same page -- great, even more duplicate covers for me to sort through.)
Another thing I've noticed is that tpub (print) books tend to lean towards full-body, or three-quarter (knees/mid-thigh and up). Ebook covers, perhaps because they have to make more impact in a much smaller format, tend to be busts -- either shoulders and up, or the same amount of space but dedicated to a torso. That's if the cover isn't of a face really close up, which I only recently realized is not that common in print books, judging from a long swath through Amazon. It can be used to dramatic effect, but then again, a face taking up the cover when you're looking at it in eight inches high can be a bit more overpowering than in 200px, after all.
I wonder if this respect for the medium (or lack thereof) is why I find some ebook covers repellent on a level I couldn't quite pin down, before: the worst of the worst seem to consistently frame and place cover-characters on the same frame of reference as print books: full or three-quarters. I end up squinting at these blurry covers that don't really make an impression because there's too much in the tiny frame.
In some ways, epub is leading the pack, and I can't say there aren't artists who are really at the forefront -- Anne Cain and GraphicFantastic being absolutely two that just can't seem to produce a bad cover even if they're paid good money to do so. But the majority of epubs seem to be continuing to look backwards when it comes to cover designs -- looking to compositional lessons of tpubs, that is -- instead of realizing that their medium is so utterly different even to the means and method of letting covers do the selling.
It's a different medium, a different format, and the art direction needs to reflect that. That means higher contrast between title and background, and less of these funky fonts that may look good when the image is 400px or greater in height, but gets scrunched so much at selling-version of 200px that it's nearly pointless. Hell, in that case, I say just hide the title/author, put that below, and use the image as selling point but not necessarily as the identical format of the image I'll see when I open the PDF. (That is, text added in once I'm viewing in larger format.)
However, all that is beside the point for those epubs whose cover artists -- no matter how dedicated the staff may be -- still suck. Some of them seriously make me wince, and all I can think is: oh, you poor poor author, stuck with that cover... my goodness, how unfortunate.
A day or so later I came across this note in a publisher's submissions guidelines/faq (edited for more generic version after seeing roughly the same sentiment at three different publishers):
We do not allow authors to provide cover art... We have a staff of artists who produce all our cover art... we're proud of the quality of our cover art.
Which I find amusing in some respects, because some of those companies are the same ones with the covers for which my only reaction is, "my goodness, that's unfortunate."
Granted, the majority of publishers (not all, but the majority) have at least moved away from computer-generated Poser covers, long may those burn in whatever hell you please. But a fair number make mistakes that to me seem pretty basic: low contrast, funky-ass font faces, static poses, and some of the most uninspiring and clueless compositions (or lack thereof). Yes. Right. Goodness, that's unfortunate.
Which is especially amusing, considering that I've had my share of friends who've commented they'd never buy a romance, no matter how good, because the by-the-numbers cover art just screams lurid!bosom!heaving!crap! Yet here I am in the privacy of my own home contemplating various works and thinking, I would never buy that book, I mean, the cover is just so freaking pathetic that I can't even imagine clicking on it.
(That's particularly sad considering that one of the writers I really like, James Buchanan, has somehow been saddled with some of the most atrociously bad cover art I've seen in a long time. It's like some five-year old got loose with a stack of magazine clippings scanned at low-quality, and thought to make up a cover by cutting and pasting in Photoshop. It's that bad, and yet Buchanan's novels are sharp and good and fierce. Why doesn't someone of Buchanan's calibre rate a cover artist like Anne Cain, anyway?)
Just around the same time, I came across mention of an online series of workshops (now closed, sadly) that were hosted/run by several of the big names in ebook coverart. There were at least links to the artists' works, and I was struck by how gorgeous many of them were -- and yet something indefinably different from standard, off-the-shelf, book cover art.
(No, I'm not going to post a litany of the Worst Covers Evah, because it's not the author's fault, but it's their name on the book that may end up associated with the snark. It's their publisher's fault for not having the decency to hire better freaking artistic directors -- not artists, because some of the art can be decent but without proper layout/design, it's defeated by bad font, bad type, bad contrast, bad composition. Bad publishers! So, no litany of snark.)
Frex, here are four covers of paperback books, chosen at random from the compilation I posted awhile back (so they remain in my gallery and thus easily snagged again, lazy me).
Now, here are three of my favorites from Anne Cain and graphicfantastic, and resized to be approximately the same as the Amazon-snagged images above:
It wasn't until I realized that one of those books in the second group was designed for print that it dawned on me: the ones for print have a lot of itty-bitty words cluttering up the cover. Mention of the author's other bestsellers, one blurb, maybe even a teaser (or is that a second blurb?), the title, the author's name, and some other stuff I can't make out.
Even so, in the second group, that one designed-for-print has some tiny letters but it's minimal. Definitely not quite cluttery, not nearly as much as the covers in the first group. I mean, this makes sense; normally, when I hold a paperback and look at teh cover, it's a fair bit larger than the 200px high version you're seeing on your screen right now (or that I see when browsing ebooks).
That means there's a bit more leeway, possibly. I mean, if the first group of covers were among a selection of ebooks, I might take a second look, based on the cover design tempting me, but it's a fair bet I'd ignore them as I do the print-versions sometimes scattered in among ebook versions (a habit I honestly can't stand from some publishers, because then it looks like they're selling two or more versions of so-and-so's latest -- I'm there for ebooks, show me the freaking ebooks, and set the print versions elsewhere and stop confusing me! ... okay, snark dialing down again).
Of course, a second look at the first group of images might also be purely for the sake of laughing with my inner twelve-year old. Because the first one, in that top group? What pops out isn't the red-on-blue (a nice contrast for print) but the white in the center, making the title look like OOD LINE and ahahahah what a stupid name, my inner tween shrieks. (And then I look again, realize, and move to the next book now that I feel stupid myself -- ohh, so that's what it says, okay, FINE.)
The second one? Red on dark gray to black is catchy in the 3D world, but not quite as clear, so it's harder to make out the title without staring intently for a second or two. The third looks like 'Embracc the Nigot' from the extra curlicues of the c and e, and the way the upper bar of the h in 'night' gets lost in the line of the woman's dress. The last one would work except I can't for the life of me make out the author's name, lost as it is with light color on light background and barely-there outlining.
Lesson: it's a lot easier to mess with contrasts and font-styles when the final version to be used as basis for judging is a version at least eight inches high by five inches wide (or greater). When it's on a computer screen that could be of any variation in color-setting, brightness, contrast, who knows what the user will see.
(There is a special place in my list of annoyances for those publishers who show the cover and note the author's name underneath -- but not the title. I can't always figure out the title when the contrast or composition or font-style is unclear. I don't always order immediately, but come back and ponder again, and it's awfully hard to find a book upon your return when the author's name was in itty-bitty link under the image, and the book cover was fuzzy or unclear in some way. "Well," I say to myself, "it looked interesting, but who knows where to find it, so never mind.")
I've also noticed that some publishers cleave closely to the kinds of styles you see in four specific genres: romance, science fiction, westerns, and epic fantasy. It's like a type of framework that must bracket the front image -- like the author's name and the title get their very own frames, and the artwork has to fit inside this imposed frame, as well.
Some e-publishers do that for specific lines/brands -- you see that style, you know, this is one that's based on X theme, or is Y length, or has Z content. The only one who seems to have nailed this style is Torquere, whose short-story classes (short, medium, novelette, novella, etc) have a specific repeated -- but very spare, simple -- graphic. Most book covers do not have a picture of a highball or a martini on them, so it's pretty obvious it's not a cover per se, so much as a stock indication of story length or theme.
The majority of other e-publishers, though, have series-covers that look remarkably like a 'regular' bookcover, and it's just re-used. I end up wondering if I'm looking at the same book I was five minutes ago, or maybe that was another book, who knows. The design is so close to regular book cover design (at least of epub ilk) that I realize I'm not thinking, 'oh, dat's a graphic image' but thinking, 'book cover!' -- and to see six 'book covers' that are all identical is to see the first and visually, if automatically, skim the rest. (This is complicated further when some publishers separate the epub and print versions and list them both on the same page -- great, even more duplicate covers for me to sort through.)
Another thing I've noticed is that tpub (print) books tend to lean towards full-body, or three-quarter (knees/mid-thigh and up). Ebook covers, perhaps because they have to make more impact in a much smaller format, tend to be busts -- either shoulders and up, or the same amount of space but dedicated to a torso. That's if the cover isn't of a face really close up, which I only recently realized is not that common in print books, judging from a long swath through Amazon. It can be used to dramatic effect, but then again, a face taking up the cover when you're looking at it in eight inches high can be a bit more overpowering than in 200px, after all.
I wonder if this respect for the medium (or lack thereof) is why I find some ebook covers repellent on a level I couldn't quite pin down, before: the worst of the worst seem to consistently frame and place cover-characters on the same frame of reference as print books: full or three-quarters. I end up squinting at these blurry covers that don't really make an impression because there's too much in the tiny frame.
In some ways, epub is leading the pack, and I can't say there aren't artists who are really at the forefront -- Anne Cain and GraphicFantastic being absolutely two that just can't seem to produce a bad cover even if they're paid good money to do so. But the majority of epubs seem to be continuing to look backwards when it comes to cover designs -- looking to compositional lessons of tpubs, that is -- instead of realizing that their medium is so utterly different even to the means and method of letting covers do the selling.
It's a different medium, a different format, and the art direction needs to reflect that. That means higher contrast between title and background, and less of these funky fonts that may look good when the image is 400px or greater in height, but gets scrunched so much at selling-version of 200px that it's nearly pointless. Hell, in that case, I say just hide the title/author, put that below, and use the image as selling point but not necessarily as the identical format of the image I'll see when I open the PDF. (That is, text added in once I'm viewing in larger format.)
However, all that is beside the point for those epubs whose cover artists -- no matter how dedicated the staff may be -- still suck. Some of them seriously make me wince, and all I can think is: oh, you poor poor author, stuck with that cover... my goodness, how unfortunate.