The Cult of the Book Cover - by Barry Scott [10.11.2010]

I’ve always been a sucker for cool book covers, surrounding myself with books that beckon to be read because the title and cover image have seduced me. When I turn my head Dylan’s Tarantula (Panther), Kris Hemensley’s The Rooms (Outback Press) and Janet Frame’s early Owls Do Cry (Pegasus Press) stare back from their pride of place, books with resonant lingering covers that mirror the excitement of the mostly small publishers that originally published them. From record album covers (the first Velvet Underground ‘peel me’ album is a pertinent music example) to books, the seventies and eighties always seemed at the forefront of cover design, striving for something with a hipness that celebrated authors as stars, even if no one had heard of them just yet.

When starting Transit Lounge I decided from the outset that I wanted each book (poetry included) to be its own entity and apart from our logo to be devoid of branding so it was always more about the author and what they had created rather than the company. Each book would wear its individuality well but the accumulation would say something about the overall aesthetic that would, and increasingly does, attract a body of writers whose work is to my mind imaginative and passionate, different. By that I don’t mean difficult, experimental or hard to read.

It’s difficult to say however if individual cover art is a successful marketing tool – success in the market is heavily dependent on getting a place in bookshops which oddly often celebrate ‘the dressing to fit in approach to life’ rather than the different.

Which is why cover art in the last few years has become dependent on formulas that cue the reader into the possibility that this one is women’s fiction, this one crime, this one fantasy, this one a political biography and this one is literary fiction −often quite text based covers. From season to season any shiny bookstore catalogue seems oddly sameish – as if the photo library images (and often celebrities) had rearranged themselves with slightly different fonts and titles. I rarely think these days I have to get that book for the cover alone. Publishers seem too nervous to be different and book store managers perhaps a tad nervous too that different covers may equal dark, difficult or edgy books that no one will want to buy.

And yes maybe it is more the challenge of independent publishers to have to design covers for works that don’t easily fit into ready-made categories. I ‘m thinking here of Anna Dusk’s In-human, a horror fiction that’s also a wry portrait of small-town life and a statement about empowerment. The inside flap of the cover which features the author’s painting of a topless Sally Hunter wearing bloody panties has certainly been seen as ‘too strong’ by some book store buyers, yet the image is a key to understanding the book and how transformation into something other than human may be seen as a metaphor for adolescence.

At Transit Lounge we like to involve the author in having input into the cover design. It’s great to get their visual sense of what the book might look like. This can result in a protracted process as often what the author has in mind may not work for the designer or us, or sometimes it isn’t readily available via image searches or sometimes it seems too documentary. Commissioned illustrations are an expensive option even for large publishers, but certainly can be very exciting. Often however the perfect image or concept presents itself. How lucky, for example, were Text publishing in sourcing the cover image for Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Even the cleverest graphic for me can’t beat the power of a single strong image. But often true book cover success depends on a good designer who has read the book or connected with the essence of it.

Transit Lounge hasn’t always got it right and there are some covers we’d like to rejig, if and when we get to reprint – oddly its usually those that have tried to emulate or conform to the marketplace. Interestingly while there is little loyalty to particular presses and really only to particular books a press such as McSweeneys in the US defies the trend. One way they do this is expending considerable effort on cover design and book production. Jordan Bass editor of the Quarterly argues that producing their titles with such high production values has resulted in McSweeneys books becoming collectable, and less disposable. When I visited their San Francisco office in 2009 they were working on a book with a fur cover. The spirit of McSweeneys is exciting and adventurous, and their cover designs are inspirational to a publisher such as Transit Lounge. Always though adventurousness is counterpointed by the market – in the US large store buyers certainly have input into cover design and perhaps it seems there are ‘rules’, even a science that can accelerate presence and sales. Are red colours selling more this month? Should we have an attractive younger woman on the cover? Do dogs on covers sell?

Being independent sometimes means travelling an alternative route, taking a risk, but it doesn’t hopefully mean being marginal or at odds with the market. What is important is the professional quality of the book cover and how it can sharpen the reader’s sense of what the author is communicating or somehow for a brief moment capture the essence of its spirit. Good covers needn’t be any more expensive than bad ones. How many times have I heard the saying: (particularly in relation to residential architecture) Money doesn’t buy good taste. It’s just so wonderful to walk through a bookshop or journey on-line and see a great cover, and then to find that the book in question is published by an independent press from somewhere, anywhere. Then resistance cannot be justified.

Barry Scott is the publisher at Transit Lounge.

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