Judging a Cover by its Book

Back when I was six years old, the teacher of the class I was in made us produce our own novel. We had to write a story, illustrate it, come up with a title, write a blurb for the back and, of course, produce a front cover. The winner got five stars.

While everyone else rushed to get scissors and glue and crayons, I got on with writing my novel, a multi-layered psychological thriller about a dinosaur eating all the kids in the playground.

As ever, the writing process took longer than I’d imagined and all I’d produced by the end of the lesson was a ten page story called ‘Run’. I did try to put a cover together at the last minute, but as I’d never been any good at folding, the front ended up three inches longer than the back, which detracted from the quality of the writing (I can still remember the teacher’s sigh now).

Everyone else in the class, on the other hand, had perfectly bound manuscripts with colour drawings on the front to go with their two or three paragraph stories. Needless to say, even though mine was the better novel, I didn’t win the five stars. The injustice still haunts me today.

So I don’t have a great track record with covers. I’ve never picked up a novel because I liked the look of a cover and, in many cases, the cover has put me off reading novels I’ve gone on to enjoy. For me, the magic of a novel lies in the strength of the story, the writing, not the way it’s been packaged, and I’d be happy if they all came in black.

Which is a pity, because I’ve had every opportunity to be involved in the decision making process for Broken’s front cover, and haven’t been able to come up with a single useful idea. The publishers have had to do all the thinking themselves.

The first idea, in the UK, was to commission an illustrator to draw Broken’s main character, an eleven year old girl named Skunk, spelling out BROKEN with objects that feature in the novel. They had an illustrator in mind and e-mailed a couple of examples of the illustrator’s work through for me to look at. Straight away, I thought the idea was completely original, loved the illustrator’s style, and couldn’t wait to see the finished product. Several weeks later, this came through.

I saw it in e-mail format first, and can still remember watching it roll out on screen. Despite my general apathy towards covers, it was brilliant to think someone had produced this off the back of something I’d written, and I fell in love with it straight away.

Sadly, there are so many things that have to be taken into account for a cover — who it will appeal to, what sort of age bracket it suggests the novel is aimed at, what it’s saying about the type of novel it is — that getting an image is often the starting point of the debate, not the end. There are also so many people who need to agree — the editor, the artist, the art director, the writer, the agent, sales and marketing, the buyers for the book-stores who will be involved in promoting the novel — that it’s a miracle any decisions ever get made. The more this image was discussed, the more it was felt that it wasn’t quite right.

Which led to attempt number two:

Again, I fell in love with this straight away, mainly because the girl in the photo looks exactly as I’ve always imagined Skunk. I also really like the grittiness of the background, and the fact Skunk’s dressed in contemporary clothing. Unlike the split opinions on the first cover, everyone seemed delighted with this one, so it looked like our decision was made.

Then, as more feedback came in, doubts were raised that the image was again not quite the right look – and it was back to the drawing board once again.

While all this was going on in England, I’d also been getting e-mails from the US and Canada asking for my thoughts on the cover for their markets. Again, I didn’t have any, so I left them to do their own thing. My editor in Canada said they were thinking along the lines of an illustration and my editor in the US said their art director wanted to do something contemporary and edgy, maybe using cigarettes as part of the image.

What the Americans actually came up with was this:

The moment I saw it, I knew. Even though it’s not contemporary, it’s got an edge of mystery, an edge of danger, and the girl, to me, looks really scared. I want to know what she’s thinking, I want to know that she’ll be ok. This, for me, is the essence of Broken. The reader knows from the first page that the narrator is in a coma, and the drive of the book is to find out what’s happened to her and if she’ll decide to pull through. This was the cover I wanted.

Happily, I wasn’t the only one to think this, as the UK and Canada have decided to go with it as well. Given it will go on sale here this month, it’s going to be a strange experience to go into a bookstore and actually look out for the cover of a novel.

It’s going to be even stranger — thirty-two years after my last disastrous attempts at creating a novel — to get my hands on something I’ve written that’s been so beautifully produced.