Cover Me

Over the course of the last week, I've been going over cover mock-ups for my new collection of stories, Other Resort Cities, which is both a fun and a little nerve wracking experience since people, you know, pretty much do judge a book by its cover. I've had good covers -- the paperback for Living Dead Girl, the cover for Simplify -- and I've had bad covers -- the off-kilter and easily smudged cover of Fake Liar Cheat that has a cell phone on the cover that now looks like a top-loading Betamax --and covers featuring Gabrielle Anwar's ass -- both of my Burn Notice books -- which, yeah, no one can complain about. In the case of Living Dead Girl and Simplify, I had final say on the covers offered to me whereas Fake Liar Cheat and Burn Notice were corporate decisions. At the time, MTV was doing the design stuff on the books that Pocket Books/MTV was putting out and you couldn't get authorial approval in the contracts even if you wanted it and with Burn Notice, hey, it's Gabrielle Anwar's ass!...but I have no say in how those books are marketed regardless.

For Other Resort Cities, we selected this rather arresting rendering (and remember, this is just a mock up, so it may well look somewhat different by the time it's in stores in October):

   

Thinking about book covers reminded me that I've always wanted to post up the covers for Living Dead Girl that I ended up not selecting which ended up being used by other books -- some more famous than others.

This was actually the cover I really, really wanted but it turns out that when Peter Dexter calls, he gets first dibs:

 

Interestingly, the paperback of Train uses a different cover and it's from the exact same photo shoot as the one used to make Peter Craig's Blood Father cover:

    

Clare Francis' book Betrayal was one of several books that over the years I've recognized as having been one of the rejected covers of Living Dead Girl, too -- there are about 15 covers out there that use this same woman floating in the water in different stages of life and death. As you'll see below, in Clare's book she's alive and showing off some serious cleavage, which seemed an odd choice for Living Dead Girl (as I recall, the fonts and layout were exactly the same for my book, too):

 

Perhaps you're starting to see a theme here: Water? Check. Body in water? Check. Depressing as fuck-all? Check. Which leads me to the book The Absence of Nectar by Kathy Hepinstall. I really liked the cover mock-up that featured the art below. In fact, it was going to be the pick after Peter Dexter stole my #1 pick from me. I didn't really think the flowers on the boat were quite right, but, well, maybe it would pull in women readers!

But then I went to Barnes & Noble and saw this book on the new releases table --  a full year before my book would come out, mind you -- and decided, you know, maybe someone should tell the publisher that there was already a book out using the art...

 

Finding another book with your cover is bound to happen when people use the same image companies, like Getty, to get the majority of their art. In the case of Simplify (and then Other Resort Cities), my publisher went directly to a gallery and found an artist the gallery thought might appeal to the aesthetic of the book, finding the awesome Ned & Shiva, who they then went back to for the new book. But I remember a few years ago bringing one of my UCLA classes to see Dan Chaon read from his book You Remind Me of Me and afterward Dan pulled out a rather disturbing thing: a Hallmark card that had the same image as his book cover. As I recall, the card was significantly sweeter -- maybe something about a child's first birthday or something similar -- than Dan's brilliant and disturbing novel.

Comments

[Nick Mamatas]

Neat! Who is the publisher?

[Stacy]

I just discovered Burn Notice two days ago. Watched Season One, checked out the site and saw your name and blinked. Thought, 'no way.'

Hope B&N gets it right in June. I want a copy all signed and stuff. No, make that two. Need one as a gift.

[Kassia Krozser]

Apropos of something, but likely not this, did Wendy tell you that I caught the building security guard reading Burn Notice: The Fix? In public. Or at least in place that is legally considered public. I may have said something about knowing the author to make myself seem cooler, but, due to being on hiatus and all that, I still have to show my official consultant badge.

I now monitor the reading material of our security people