Judge away: A cover can actually tell you a lot about a book
CBC
It turns out an old saying might be wrong — you can judge a book by its cover after all, say authors and book designers.
"If you've got that shirtless cowboy looking out into the field, his truck nearby, you know what's going to be in that book," cover designer Brigid Pearson told The Sunday Magazine.
Pearson, a cover design artist based out of New York, has designed thousands of book covers, including the paperback cover for New York Times bestseller Pachinko, a historical fiction novel by Min Jin Lee. She says each genre has its own unique approach.
"I have designed for romance…. It's a very specific language," said Pearson.
"Those meetings are really fun, talking about made up cowboys. There's a lot of talk about pecs and their shirt and facial features and their jeans."
Whether the genre is romance, thriller or fantasy, artists, designers and authors who collaborate on book covers say they're more critical to a book's success or failure than most people understand.
When artist Jaya Miceli approaches a new title, she needs to capture a lot of information in one image.
"I really try to get a sense or a feeling or a mood of the story," said Miceli.
Miceli, a senior art director for the Scribner imprint at Simon & Schuster and a freelance cover designer in Brooklyn, designed the cover for the popular thriller The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
For that book, Miceli said she moved away from a literal interpretation of the title and went more abstract.
"I tried to create that feeling of being that actual person sitting on the train, this girl who's a drunk and she's unreliable. And so the letters become, you know, doubled up and not quite clear," she said.
Miceli said that sometimes what comes out of the design process is profound, like when she designed a cover for The Readymade Thief, a thriller by Augustus Rose.
"The author said something to the affect of, 'Thank you for designing the cover I never knew I wanted.'"
But Toronto author Naben Ruthnum said things don't always go as smoothly, and the relationship between writer and artist can be adversarial at times. Ruthnum has written books such as Curry: Reading, Eating and Race; Hero of Our Time; and Find You in the Dark.