Long years ago, when Crème de la Crime was in the planning stages and we were seeking advice from every available source, we were told by several people that a famous name on the cover would make booksellers, and possibly potential buyers, look twice at any book we published. Since our USP, raison d’etre, whatever you want to call it, was giving new authors a chance to shine, that required a bit of lateral thinking.
New authors included authors who were already established in some other genre but wanted to turn to crime. With that in mind, we toyed with the idea of asking J K Rowling if her first post-Harry oeuvre might fit our brief, but our letter must have got lost in the post.
Continuing to think laterally, we eventually realised that the famous name on the cover doesn’t necessarily have to belong to the author who wrote the book. (Remember we were new to it all; it took a while for the penny to drop.) Even well-known authors enlist the support of their equally well-known colleagues to persuade the reading public that this book is even better than the previous ones.
So we did too. Attending big bookshop promotion events and weekend conventions and festivals mean you get to meet a lot of people, and it doesn’t take long before you’re on waving-across-the-room or even sharing-a bottle-of-wine terms with some of them. And crime writers are such a friendly bunch of people; when I was putting together Criminal Tendencies, our charity short story collection, even the people who said no said it apologetically and so, so nicely. So asking someone whose name regularly appears in the bestseller lists if they will very kindly read this book and offer a quotable opinion, preferably favourable, turned out to be much less like climbing a perpendicular mountain than I expected.
The question I want to ask, though is – does it work? When Mark Billingham describes Maureen Carter as the Second City’s finest * or the inimitable Simon Brett calls Kaye C Hill’s work a splash of colour in the prevailing noir, does it actually persuade a reader new to the author’s work to choose that book over another?
I’d like to think it does. It would be easy to be cynical and assume endorsements happen on a you-scratch-my-back basis; but so far, every time I’ve asked someone if they’ll provide a cover quote, the response has been, send me the book and I’ll endorse it if I like it – but only if. And on a personal note, the main reason I publish crime fiction is that I love reading it, and if an author whose work I enjoy supports a book by someone unfamiliar, it certainly whets my interest.
So what’s the consensus out there in the reading world? Does a famous name other than the author’s on the cover make a difference? Does it make you think, hm, might try that ? Or do you take the sceptical approach?
Finally, a small confession. One year we cheated. Well, slightly; the quote itself was perfectly genuine. Reviewing Maureen Carter, our brilliant blogger emeritus Sharon Wheeler compared her, very favourably, to Ian Rankin. Guess what appeared on the cover of Maureen’s next one?
* note for American Dead Guy followers: Maureen’s books are set in Birmingham, which is the UK’s second (largest) city.
