May's First Friday Thread: Book Cover Rejects!
Ready for some fun?! How about a look at some of the covers that didn't make it onto my books.
The First Friday Thread is where I often answer questions that my paid subscribers have asked me to address. A while back, someone asked me about my book covers – whether it was hard to choose the right cover, and what makes us choose or reject a certain book cover. To explain, I thought it would be fun to show you a few of the covers that never made it onto my books. I’m sure you’ll see why!
I’m very lucky that my books always have beautiful covers. I work closely with my publishers on getting the cover just right. But it’s worth knowing that a book cover is really a marketing document so it doesn’t need to show an exact representation of the main character. Rather, it needs to create the right kind of mood, feel, and tone. From the publisher’s point of view, it needs to attract readers to pick up the book so that they’ll turn it over and read the back cover blurb and then, hopefully, buy it.
The Difficulty With Historical Fiction Book Covers
Historical fiction is tricky. If you’re going to have a person on the front cover of your book, they need to look as if they’re from the era you’re writing about. We use images from stock libraries – photographers set up shoots using contemporary models dressed in period clothing, then they offer the images to the stock libraries (the best libraries are very discerning about what images they take) and then it’s up to the cover designer to scroll through those stock libraries, trying to find the right image for a book.
The difficulty with historical fiction is that sometimes it’s very obvious in the image that it’s a modern woman playing dress ups. Or you might find the right woman, but the image is cropped in a way that it just doesn’t work on the front cover of a book. You never find the absolute perfect image. Things always have to be altered: hair colour, clothing, background, even removing a wedding ring from a finger if you’re writing about a character who’s single (we had to do that on The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre).