Pulling Up the Covers

Jeff Cohen

You'll forgive me if I don't use the old "don't judge a book by its cover" adage here. Because this week, I'm thinking about covers. Book covers. Real book covers.

I have always (for seven years now=always) had a rather ambivalent attitude toward the covers of my books. While I liked some more than others, I've never felt that one absolutely hit the mark perfectly. And while I started out thinking that it's what's between the covers that matters, I have found that the cover really does make an enormous difference in terms of sales. Books by authors whom most readers don't know are helped tremendously by good covers, and done a disservice by bad.

It's never just one element that decides whether a book is a hit or a flop. A great cover on a lousy book won't help, and a breakout novel with a mediocre image on the front isn't going to be totally lost. But there's a definite correlation. 

In fact, and I'll say this right out: I think the cover of Some Like It Hot-Buttered dealt the Double Feature Mystery series a blow from which its sales numbers never recovered. Yes, it's entirely possible that people didn't want to read a smart-ass series about a guy who owns a comedy movie theatre and solves murders. I don't doubt for a minute that I could have done better in some areas. I should have promoted more. I should have thought ahead better. But that cover didn't help.

See? For the first book in a series, it doesn't fill the bill. You'd never know from looking at this picture that the book takes place in a movie theatre. You'd think it was a cooking book, not a comedy movie book. 

  You would think, I'll argue, that this was the story of someone who is murdered while making popcorn. Instead, it's the story of a movie theatre owner who investigates when a patron is murdered with poisoned popcorn during a screening of Young Frankenstein. The illustration gives the reader--especially the casual buyer in a Barnes & Noble who's never heard of this book (or author) before--the wrong impression. It's attractive, and it conveys the sense of humor that the book has (or A sense of humor, anyway), but it doesn't help the series.

Now, the first novel I wrote, For Whom The Minivan Rolls, had what I think is a very attractive cover. Take a look:  I think it's elegant and eye-catching. It conveys the message that this is a mystery book, and hopefully the title delivers the rest of the information. It's one of my favorite covers. But it's also the cover of my first novel, and with more experience, today I'd notice that it doesn't really fit the tone of the story. It certainly says, "mystery novel," but it doesn't say much (metaphorically) about humor or the way the story unfolds. 

Without question my favorite from the Double Feature series is the current cover, for A Night at the Operation.  Here, we have the movie theatre marquee (something my fabulous editor helped to facilitate), a sense of foreboding over a missing character (the empty doctor's coat), and a few elements from the story. It's the third in the series, so if a reader doesn't know by now that it's supposed to be a comical mystery, the word "Comedy" on the marquee might give that idea away. I think it works nicely, and it has an attractive color scheme. Unfortunately, for reasons I both do and don't understand, the first two books in the series hadn't exactly set the world on fire, so by this point, no cover was going to make a big enough difference, I guess. Too bad, because it's a really nice cover.

My least favorite of all the covers my books have had is this one: 

I mean. First of all, the green makes me just a little queasy. The legs and (especially) the hat make me think this book takes place in 1962, and the relevance to the contents of the book is limited to the fact that one character is referred to by the nickname "Crazy Legs." There were some discussions about this cover, believe me. But while some nice publishers (including Berkley Prime Crime, which publishes the Double Feature series and my upcoming series, which I'll get to in a minute) will ask the author for cover ideas, authors (particularly mid-list and those aspiring to be mid-list) are rarely given any kind of authority over the cover of the novel.

This brings me to your homework assignment, class: My next novel, coming in June 2010, is the first in a new series. The current title (although this might change) is NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED, and the author (and this is very unlikely to change) is E.J. Copperman. I'll rant on about nom de plumes in general and explain the evolution of this one at some later date.

The story is such: A woman returns to her Jersey shore hometown to restore an ancient Victorian and turn it into a guest house. There, through a series of circumstances, she finds two ghosts "living" on the premises. Luckily, they're fairly benign (I hesitate to use the word "friendly," as it dredges up songs about Casper), but they have a request: They want our heroine to find out who killed them.

Now, sometime relatively soon, I'm going to get a phone call asking if I have any cover ideas. And I really don't. So I'm open to suggestions. The criteria: The cover should at least hint at the premise for the series, it should be relatively light in tone (although not so cutesy you want to strangle it), and it should, above all other things, be attractive to potential readers.

Suggestions?

Comments

[Jersey Jack]

I think the problem has been, and always will be, combining mystery with humor. The artist is torn -- Do I play for thrilling or funny? A NIGHT AT THE OPERATION tries hard, and is clearly the best cover.

With the new one, at least they can play up the female protag, put (like every urban fantasy novel I've seen this year) a leggy, attractive woman on the cover. Also, you've got the creepy Victorian mansion to work with, maybe ghosts peeking out an upstairs window.

This is going to be your favorite cover, I bet.

Ms. Copperman. :-)

[Maternity nursing clothing]

I think it works nicely, and it has an attractive color scheme.

[Karen Downing]

Love the books; disagree with you about the covers.
I liked the cover for "Hot Buttered." I didn't buy it *because* of the cover, but the artwork didn't detract from the promise of the back cover, or the reviews that said it was hysterically funny. Maybe this is because I'm an age 50+ female who is looking for a good read without a lot of explicit sex, violence, or politics. Yeah, I know---"cozies." Oh well.

I went on to read the others in the series, with no quarrel with the covers. But there are only 3 of them, alas ... :-(

So I had to start looking for your other books. Ugh. It took several tries to figure out what the graphic for the cover of "Minivan" was even intended to be--and that was with the title as a major clue. I thought at first that my aging computer/monitor had chopped up the graphic or was leaving chunks of it in limbo. No such luck. Someone actually deliberately created that, and some other taste-impaired person signed off on it.

Because I have liked your other books, I expect to like this series too. (That's IF I can find it in a paperback version, because I hate holding big heavy hardbacks, and I refuse to destroy what's left of my eyesight by reading entire books on tiny screens.) But I sure as hell wouldn't have picked it up off the shelf in a bookstore, or from a page of "if you liked XXX, you might enjoy one of these" on the Web. So there you have one female's opinion. ("Sometimes mistaken, but never in doubt.")

Good luck with the new one, and please do keep cranking 'em out. The world needs more reasons to laugh. If you ever leave NJ, please consider moving to Seattle and opening a theater that only shows comedies :-) It's not true that it rains all the time here, and that pasty greenish hue to our complexions is not moss, merely a dearth of sunlight. But what are vitamin D pills for, anyway? ;-)
Sincerely,
A Fan