Tuesday, March 27, 2007
cover stories
One of the things I was most confident about concerning my book was its cover; even before I had written a word I had visualised the front cover. Inspired by the album cover for ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ I imagined the same font as the album but using imagery more appropriate imagery perhaps terraced houses instead of carousels, the Vauxhall car factory rather than the boardwalk. In the event the cover design featured a childhood photograph of me with my sister and father taken sometime during the early eighties. The photograph is a favourite of mine as it is one of very few where my father is being affectionate- he has his arm around my shoulder- and it seems to be to embody many of the themes in the book- the setting is unmistakably England, the time is the past and the combination of my father wearing a shirt and tie while determinedly putting his arm around me reveals both his formality as well as suggesting the nature of our relationship. It was a potent and powerful potential front cover. Or so I thought.
It turned out that the feedback that was coming in to my publishers was decidedly ambivalent about the cover and so the decision was made to radically change how the book was being presented. Out with poignancy and fathers and sons and in came Bruce Springsteen and stylised nostalgia; the first time I saw the suggested new cover I was, I have to confess, rather shocked as it seemed to have very little to do with my actual book. But after sending it out to friends for their reaction it was pretty obvious that those evil geniuses in marketing know what they are doing. Virtually everyone I asked said that the new cover was a huge improvement on the original and that it would prompt them to pick the book up in a store in a way that the previous cover might not have done. In the end that is the essential purpose of a cover- to encourage the curious to find out more about the book and anything that can assist this has to be a good reason. I still think the old cover was beautiful if understated but in the present cutthroat world of publishing brash and pickable trumps beautiful and understated every time.