“If you have that shirtless cowboy looking out in the field, his truck nearby, you know what’s going to be in this book,” cover designer Brigid Pearson told The Sunday Magazine. Pearson, a New York-based cover design artist, has designed thousands of book covers, including the paperback cover of the New York Times bestseller Pachinko, a historical fantasy novel by Min Jin Lee. He says each genre has its own unique approach. “I’ve designed for romance … It’s a very specific language,” Pearson said. “These meetings are really fun, talking about made-up cowboys. There’s a lot of talk about their pecs, their shirt and facial features, and their jeans.” Whether the genre is romance, thriller or fantasy, artists, designers and writers who collaborate on book covers say they are more critical to a book’s success or failure than most people realize.

Writer vs designer

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 feeling or a feel or a mood of the story,” Micheli said. Miceli, senior art director for the Scribner imprint at Simon & Schuster and a freelance cover designer in Brooklyn, designed the cover for Paula Hawkins’ popular thriller The Girl on the Train For that book, Miceli said she moved away from the literal interpretation of the title and went more abstract. “I tried to create this feeling that I’m this real person sitting on the train, this girl who’s drunk and unreliable. And so the letters become, you know, doubled and not clear enough,” she said. Brigid Pearson designed the paperback cover of Min Jin Lee’s New York Times bestseller Pachinko. (Grand Central Publishing) 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 effect of, ‘Thank you for designing the cover I never knew I wanted.’ But Toronto writer Naben Ruthnum said things don’t always go so 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 And, he admits, the writer doesn’t always know better.
“You can’t trust an author’s aesthetic values ​​as the right marketing decision,” Ruthnum said. “I think writers can often be really unfair to designers and think they know exactly what the book should look like.” He said that often more than the writer and designer are involved. A sales team, a publicity team and the book’s editor are involved in the process. “Those are valuable opinions because those are the people who interact the most with the audience and see which cover will actually help sell the book,” Ruthnum said. Omar El Akkad is the author of What Strange Paradise. (CBC) But Omar El Akkad said the design process is completely different from writing the book. The Canadian Egyptian author of What Strange Paradise says that writing is a very individual project, but what follows is not. “Suddenly you see someone else take a play and they can interpret it in a completely different way,” said the Giller Prize-winning author. “It was a reminder that this thing I had created was now going out into the world to be interpreted in many, many different ways.”

Like the shirtless cowboy in a romance novel or the double letters in The Girl on the Train, covers can tell you what kind of book it might be. And repetition, Ruthnum said, can be helpful. “I was worried that my thrillers, especially, would seem too generic, that they would look like just another thriller,” Ruthnum said. Artist Jaya Miceli wanted to create a sense of unreliability from the cover of The Girl on the Train. (Doubleday Canada) “What really helps your thriller sell is the similarity to two other books in the genre.” A book’s cover and title are often a product of their time. There was a point where many thrillers had the word girl in the title, from Gone Girl to The Girl on the Train, Ruthnum said. One of the popular cover trends is known as blob books, which consist of abstract art with the title. Ruthnum believes these types of covers are popular because they look good on the phone’s screen, but Pearson points to another benefit – cost savings. “We could design by customizing photography and hire photographers, models and stylists, but there’s no money to do that anymore,” Pearson said. “But we can all go on our iPads and design some typography and make some really nice abstract backgrounds and they come out great.”

As seen on TV

Putting an “as seen on Netflix” sticker or changing the cover for the book’s movie poster is also a popular trend these days. Ruthnum said he can give a book a small collection. “I think sometimes we get more perspective on these things as they get older,” Ruthnum said. “If you have a copy of TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that has [actor] Peter O’Toole in his Lawrence of Arabia costume on the cover, it’s a beautiful book, isn’t it? Because now it’s connected to something else. It’s a neat cultural artifact.” But not everyone is a fan of the trend. “I’ve never liked it … I’ve never picked up one of these things and thought, ‘Oh, that was a great artistic decision,’” El Akkad said. TE Lawrence was a British archaeologist, military officer and author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. (Penguin) But El Akkad jokes that he’s willing to change his tune, for the right price. “If it ever happens to one of my books, because of the amount of money involved… I’m going to come back on this show and tell you how much I love the new movie poster cover and how much it means to me personally. And. I will lie because they gave me a lot of money.” And that gets to the root of the cover – the money. A nice cover helps a book sell. This was Kevin Buckley’s experience. He’s worked at TYPE Books in Toronto for 16 years and says it’s very important to have a cover that grabs the customer’s attention. “It’s very important for the simple reason that you pick things out with your eyes when you look at a table full of books,” Buckley said. And El Akkad said you can, in a sense, judge the quality of a book by how it’s displayed. “If you pick up a book and it has an amazing cover, chances are a lot of people involved in that process were so moved by the book that they got past it and really tried to capture the essence of it.” Produced by Andrea Hoang.