John King
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
How much input into the book covers do you have? - I note that Dag in Knife 3 and 4 is quite different in appearance from the rather attractive 2-spread for the first two books. For me, covers can make a real difference. Thanks anyway John King
Lois McMaster Bujold
My input has varied wildly over the years, from none to much, and a lot of experiment has shown that how much input I have has no relationship to how satisfactory the outcome is. Regardless of what you ask artists for (especially in words), what you get back will be related to the pictures in their heads, or maybe their favorite reference materials, and not at all to the pictures in yours. Words are nearly useless; giving them pictures helps some (an old tip from Jim Baen) but not much. It's a crap shoot.
I had the same amount of input to all four of the Sharing Knife, covers, same artist. What I got back was never the picture in my head I'd started out with, and sometimes not even what prelim sketches had led me to expect.
When one has been handed a finished painting, there is very little that can be done to revise it. First, the artist, who imagined it was just fine, gets very cranky about being asked to go back, and not only because they aren't being paid for that. Note also another limit is that all paper book covers are contracted, ordered, and paid for by the publisher, not the writer.
I've also noticed a phenomenon in myself which I've mentally dubbed "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." If I'm presented with a piece of art that is Just Wrong, I'll fix upon little details that seem easy to repaint, getting pickier and pickier about them as they fail to fix the underlying problem. (And getting the artist more and more irritated, as one naturally would be.) The real solution is to sink the whole boat and start over, which I can only do if I'm paying for it (twice), and there is no hard publication deadline. I've done this once, to good effect, but that was very far into my lifelong learning process. I should do an illustrated blog post about that one, some slow day.
Artists will argue that covers are just advertisements, little billboards that have done their job if they get the prospective purchaser to pick up, or pick out, the book, and the details don't matter. I argue that they are the very first moment of the reading experience just as much as the opening page of text, coloring the reader's expectations about what comes after. Wrong covers start the readers off on the wrong foot, from which they may not easily recover.
Ta, L.
My input has varied wildly over the years, from none to much, and a lot of experiment has shown that how much input I have has no relationship to how satisfactory the outcome is. Regardless of what you ask artists for (especially in words), what you get back will be related to the pictures in their heads, or maybe their favorite reference materials, and not at all to the pictures in yours. Words are nearly useless; giving them pictures helps some (an old tip from Jim Baen) but not much. It's a crap shoot.
I had the same amount of input to all four of the Sharing Knife, covers, same artist. What I got back was never the picture in my head I'd started out with, and sometimes not even what prelim sketches had led me to expect.
When one has been handed a finished painting, there is very little that can be done to revise it. First, the artist, who imagined it was just fine, gets very cranky about being asked to go back, and not only because they aren't being paid for that. Note also another limit is that all paper book covers are contracted, ordered, and paid for by the publisher, not the writer.
I've also noticed a phenomenon in myself which I've mentally dubbed "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." If I'm presented with a piece of art that is Just Wrong, I'll fix upon little details that seem easy to repaint, getting pickier and pickier about them as they fail to fix the underlying problem. (And getting the artist more and more irritated, as one naturally would be.) The real solution is to sink the whole boat and start over, which I can only do if I'm paying for it (twice), and there is no hard publication deadline. I've done this once, to good effect, but that was very far into my lifelong learning process. I should do an illustrated blog post about that one, some slow day.
Artists will argue that covers are just advertisements, little billboards that have done their job if they get the prospective purchaser to pick up, or pick out, the book, and the details don't matter. I argue that they are the very first moment of the reading experience just as much as the opening page of text, coloring the reader's expectations about what comes after. Wrong covers start the readers off on the wrong foot, from which they may not easily recover.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Gary
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
As someone who can only dream of writing with the skill and proficiency that you have, can you share with me some of the things in your life that you believe has caused your writing to progress to its current state? Beyond repetition and revision what do you feel has most impacted your ability as an author?
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Nov 28, 2020 07:18AM · flag
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