Simon Potter (Design Services Manager at Printondemand-worldwide), reflects on cover design, having worked for many years with both major publishers and indie authors
“You can’t judge a book by its cover,” said Mr Tulliver in George Eliot’s 1860 classic The Mill on the Floss.
Alternatively, if you prefer down-and-dirty, sixteen-bar blues, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” sang Bo Diddley in 1962.
It’s a phrase that’s consequently been used by somewhere in the region of 412 million other people but is it true?
Well, yes and no. When dear old Mr Tulliver used the words about Daniel Defoe's The History of the Devil it was an innocent age, long long before illustrations had been invented as a way of enticing readers to open up a book and have a decent sniff of the pages inside. Indeed, all books looked pretty much the same, the cover was simply something solidish to protect the delicate delights that lay within.
But then, about 120 years ago along came a chap – let’s call him Derek – who thought a pretty picture might be a nice idea. Actually, it might be better to call him Богдан because it was the Russians who started the craze.
Unfortunately, little did Богдан know, that he was opening Pandora’s Box. The best thing I ever read about cover design – and I wish I could claim to have written it – was the magical wisdom “Just because you can design your own book cover doesn’t mean you should.”
At Printondemand-worldwide, we not only carry out innovative, electrifying and downright gorgeous cover designs, we also print a lot of material for everyone ranging from some of the world’s largest publishers to old Bert from down the road who’s cobbled together some of his mucky limericks into a self-published book.
As Design Services Manager, I get to see an awful lot of covers that are supplied for us to print. Some sit there smugly, looking down their nose at me as if to say “You wouldn’t have had the imagination to design me, would you?” and after a tense stand-off I’d growl back something like “Yeah, but at least I’d have got the spine width right” and we’d call it quits.
On the other hand, a lot of covers just sit there crying out for me to hit the delete button and put them out of their misery. Unless you’re a frighteningly talented professional artist, don’t draw your own picture for a book cover. If you’re not excruciatingly adept at using Photoshop, don’t try superimposing a person’s face on a lion’s body. Actually, just don’t do that even if you can.
In fact, to cut a long story short, leave it to the experts.
“I want a soldier with an eye patch and an obvious arm injury limping through a forest scene, being chased by a pack of hunting dogs and carrying a new-born baby in his good arm, with helicopters overhead, one of them exploding. Then there should be a ghost-like apparition of five nuns to one side of him. And an old Celtic stone cross just in front of him,” an author would say. It’s almost as though Basil Fawlty were egging him on. “And herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically...”
No no no.
Golden rule number 1 – Keep it simple. Don’t over-complicate the cover giving the poor, downtrodden reader too much to take in.
There is something worse. Something so despicably evil that I can barely bring myself to write about it. Beelzebub himself would be proud... of any cover using... gulp... Comic Sans for its title.
Comic Sans is for comics, for goodness sake! After you’ve invested 28 years of your life in researching your three-volume magnum opus The Pantologistic Ephemeris to Neo-Floccinaucinihilipilification in Post-Arthurian Sub-Wessex Dynasticism and you’re ready to unleash it on the world’s most learned scholars, don’t use $&*@ing Comic Sans!
At least if you take away nothing else from this, let me share with you the interesting fact that those symbols used in place of naughtiness are called grawlixes. There, you’ve learned something new.
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Print on Demand Worldwide are sponsoring our 15th September event on New Print Models. You can book to come along here.
Here's some more thoughts, this time on self (funded) publishing from our September event sponsor, Print On Demand Worldwide's, business development manager, David Birkett.
It’s fascinating to witness, especially in one’s own industry, the development of a term which – for whatever reason – has become questioned or contested. There has been a high-profile battle raging for some time now, in print, social and other media, over what to call and how to categorise those people who fund their own publishing. By this I mean individuals, of course, as otherwise we are talking about publishers. I haven’t heard the term ‘vanity publishing’ used recently, and ‘self-publishing’, which had sat smugly in place for some time, is being jostled sideways by the term ‘indie publishing’. The last should not, of course be confused with ‘independent publishing’, which itself is not an easy category to define with precision. ‘Self-publishing’ is in itself inaccurate, except in those cases where print machinery shares living space with the author, a more accurate designation being ‘self-financed publishing’. Each of these terms carries its own knapsack of assumptions and implications which, until recently, seemed to be largely negative and dismissive.
The profound changes in technology which have greatly broadened access to physical and digital publishing have naturally raised, or highlighted with greater intensity, the questions about value and legitimacy which always pertained to indie books (for ease of writing, if no other reason, I shall persist with that term). The changes in language reflect this process, and it has been interesting to see the debate about how indie authors and books should be regarded move from a fairly hostile and entrenched to a more conciliatory tone. I don’t think anyone could seriously claim that a writer of quality and merit, define those terms how you may, will necessarily be adopted by a publishing house, and the examples of books which have attained global best-seller status having been initially ignored by ‘official’ publishers are many in number. Equally, it would be a brave person who said that editorial judgement and rigour were such that everything produced by said houses has glittered with quality and made a serious contribution to culture. This embracing attitude to a diversity of publishing models and content has been recently reflected by, for example, The Guardian’s ‘self-published book of the month’ prize and a specialist annual equivalent for historical fiction. The latter, run by The Historical Novel Society, has been championed by a doyenne of both the indie and historical novel-writing worlds, Helen Hollick, whose blog post ‘Why I went Indie’ is well worth reading as a summary of the relevant issues.
I should at this point declare a somewhat vested interest, in that Printondemand-worldwide has an author services arm called Fast-Print, which has seen all manner of content brought into print, from family histories through poetry collections to incredible tales of travel and exploration. It is, however, my sincere belief that the more diversity we have in publishing, the healthier the industry will be and that, along with ingenious new models such as crowd-funding, we ought to welcome a plurality of voices and routes to print as a benefit of technological and cultural progress.
What's it like going from working in a physical bookshop to a virtual one?
Here's a personal note from our September sponsor, David Birkett of Printondemand-worldwide.
The Invisible book-sellers of Peterborough
A nameless and wise French philosopher observed that ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’, a sentiment that was pithily rephrased in 1972 when The New Seekers sang ‘All my life’s a circle’. My first job in the book-trade – now twinkling vaguely in the roseate glow of fond nostalgia – was as a bookseller for a small, independent bookshop in Bedford. There was barely an internet, the Net Book Agreement presided in smug imperturbability over the industry, and we thought it terribly smart that our books-in-print data could be summoned via a microfiche reader in the blink of five minutes or so. Time passed, and – having cut my retail teeth – my eyes were dazzled by the decadent lights of Woking, and the then newly-opened Methven’s bookshop, where I learnt to speak EPOS and saw the Net Book Agreement tumble like dictatorial statuary; (shares in shoe companies rose exponentially as we spent the next few months frantically running to rival outlets and back, having hastily scribbled down their Grisham, Palin, Delia, etc. prices). After migrating to various sales and marketing jobs (Deep Books, Troika, Zed Books, Stacey International, Aurora Metro Press, The Letchworth Centre for Healthy Living – honestly) I found myself working for Printondemand-worldwide and their recently-launched online book retailer, The Great British Book Shop.
It’s wonderful to be a bookseller again, albeit a virtual one. While I miss, and always will, the physical meetings with customers, I am still promoting reading, books, authors and publishers, and we’ve already collaborated with the likes of Gallic Books, Nosy Crow, Pen & Sword, Casemate, Osprey and their authors, on guest blogs and themed promotions. It’s been particularly exciting sponsoring a BookBench with The National Literacy Trust for their Books About Town campaign. Our bench depicts the Terry Pratchett Discworld character The Librarian, who is transformed from a human into an orangutan (now there’s a career path), and we’re happy to be donating a proportion of our sales to the Orangutan Foundation for the duration of the campaign. Although we’re supplying titles conventionally via a wholesale relationship, we can also take advantage of POD relationships that publishers have with our parent company to use that delivery method through the bookshop, enabling us to work with lower retail discounts and streamlining the route to market. One of the excellent but far from household names that’s cropped up in this capacity is Strelka Press, among whose titles ‘Can Jokes Bring Down Governments’ is proving very popular, and perhaps topical. We’re steadily signing up publishers for this (non-exclusive) relationship, and one of the aspects of the job that fires my colleagues and I with missionary zeal is reaching out to publishers in a spirit of fairness and co-operation; it’s also exciting to be exploring interesting and effective ways to spread the word about TGBBS to the international book-buying community, and the social media worlds have been of great assistance with that task.
What don’t I miss about physical bookshop work? Drafting the Christmas work rota.
David Birkett
Business Development Manager
Printondemand-worldwide, including The Great British Book Shop.
Words by Chris Russell, photos by Daniel Solomons.
Eric Huang from digital agency Made In Me chaired July’s Byte The Book, which brought together James Woollam of F&W Media, Head of eBooks at Unbound Xander Cansell and Asi Sharabi, one of the names behind the hugely successful Lost My Name book series.
Justine Solomons thanks July sponsors Peer1 Hosting (sitting to the right in the front row).
Opening the floor, Eric pointed out that the much-parroted line ‘Publishing is dying’ is actually a lazy cliché, and in all corners of the industry people are finding new and innovative ways to generate revenue. He then passed over to James Woollam, and the audience learned how illustrated non-fiction publishers F&W have, in recent years, morphed from a trade-focussed business to a consumer-focussed one. Where once their income was derived chiefly from selling books on the craft industry, the bulk of their revenue now comes from the retail of craft products themselves. Every new F&W author is asked to create a suite of products around their book, from video content to online craft courses, and in doing so build a community of ‘fans’ who will continue to generate multiple, distinct revenue streams over the course of their career.
The panel from right to left, Eric Huang (chair), Asi Sharabi, Xander Cansell and James Woollam
Crowd-funded publisher Unbound was, Xander explained, founded three years ago “by three authors in a pub”. Like Kickstarter, Unbound offers readers a tiered system of rewards that go above and beyond the simple purchase of a book. The most popular of these, by far, has turned out to be lunch with the author, which suggests consumers are keener than ever to invest in experiences that allow them to connect more deeply with their favourite writers. In short, Unbound combine an effective technical platform with an ability to tap into the emotional side of the industry; that is to say, they understand why readers love books. This is clearly also true of Asi Sharabi and the team behind the Lost My Name children’s book series, which has notched up sixty thousand sales across ninety countries during its first year alone. As Eric underlined, this is very unusual for a debut picture book - especially for one which, according to Asi, “began as a pet project”. The company’s success lies in developing a whole new technology: though personalised books have been around for forty years, to Asi the quality seemed inconsistent, and furthermore it appeared that personalised print-on-demand simply didn’t exist. Creating their own personalised POD engine, they tapped into the hugely profitable family market and are now being approached by other businesses hoping to license the Lost My Name tech platform for their own use.
A physical book makes an appearance on the Byte the Book panel
So what advice did the panel have for others in the publishing industry hoping to emulate their success? James revealed that ‘free’was a vital part of F&W’s strategy, and the company was proactive in offering free online content that would help drive traffic to their website. They also pay close attention to their Google Analytics data, and in one recent example published a book called The Knitted Alphabet when they discovered the search term “knitted letters”was bringing a groundswell of customers to their site. Xander explained that Unbound had seen success with writers who nurtured their audience. “Find something you can offer that no one else can”, he concluded, “and let people pay you for it”. Asi, finally, re-emphasised the importance of finding and filling gaps in the market. “Anywhere there is inefficiency”, he said, “is exciting for a technologist”.
Chair Eric Huang does a great job of looking after audience and panel
The tone of the evening was perhaps best summed up by a comment on the tweet-board from sci-fi writer @JasminKirkbride. Could the future of publishing, she suggested, be that it’s not called publishing at all…?
Our writer-in-residence Christopher Russell recently published his debut novel Mockstars through Red Button Publishing − a connection that was made at Byte the Book. In this interview, both writer and publisher talk about the importance of networking, and how Byte the Book was instrumental in bringing them together.
THE WRITER: Christopher Russell
How did you first come to attend Byte the Book?
I crashed into the publishing industry in early 2013, having spent over four years working on my debut novel, Mockstars. The book was inspired by my tour diaries for rock/pop band The Lightyears and, as a full-time musician, I was entirely new to publishing − I knew nobody. I was just beginning to push the book out to agents, but I had this feeling that there was only so much I could achieve sitting at home, leafing through the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook. I knew I had to get ‘out there’ (whatever that meant) and, one day, Byte the Book popped up in my Twitter feed. The idea of larking about at the Ivy rather appealed to me, so I booked a ticket and went along.
What were your impressions of that first event, and the industry in general?First, bear in mind I was transitioning into publishing from a very different industry. I adore the music business, but it’s also cold and ruthless and there’s nobody to hold your hand. People are constantly trying to out-cool each other (plus most bands have been screwed over at least once) and this leads to a general standoffishness between the artists and the suits. Relative to this, the publishing industry felt like one of those soft play areas you take toddlers to. Everyone was incredibly friendly, endlessly passionate about their careers and genuinely interested in what I was doing, even if it didn’t directly correlate with their line of work. I probably made more connections in one evening than I had in the previous two years in music. For instance, after that first event, I spent three hours in the pub with top literary agents James Wills (Watson, Little) and Zoe King (The Blair Partnership), who were not only thoroughly charming but also gave me tons of advice about finding representation. I wandered home that night through Leicester Square, slightly tipsy, feeling like the publishing world was far, far smaller than it appeared from the outside ... and, what’s more, chock-full of brilliant, approachable people.
You met Red Button, who would eventually publish Mockstars, at one of our events. Tell us more about how that came about
After a handful of BtB events I noticed Justine advertising for a writer-in-residence on Twitter. I jumped at this opportunity straight away because I knew it would help with meeting people and, more importantly, get me a seat on the front row (I don’t want to go on about it, but I also got my own sign). It just so happened that my first gig as writer-in-residence was being sponsored by Red Button Publishing, who I had checked out on the internet and pegged as a potentially good match for Mockstars. I mentioned this to Justine, who said she’d introduce us on the night. True to her word, Justine got Karen and I talking, I rolled out the old elevator pitch, submitted the novel to them the next day and a few weeks later they offered to publish it. Around about the same time I landed representation with Ed Wilson at Johnson & Alcock, and it began to seem like all the pieces were falling into place. Just five months previously I had rocked up at the Ivy with no contacts, no agent and no publisher ... and now I had all three. Byte the Book was absolutely instrumental in making that happen.
THE PUBLISHER: Caroline Goldsmith, co-founder of Red Button Publishing
Red Button Publishing is an independent publisher established in 2012 by two industry professionals, Caroline Goldsmith and Karen Ings, to give a voice to talented fiction writers often overlooked by the mainstream.
How did you first come to attend Byte the Book?
Karen Ings and I attended the very first Byte the Book event in early 2012, having been told about it by a colleague of mine, Karina Luke at Penguin Books. There were just twenty or so attendees and we spent the evening in a heated debate about whether digital publishing was a good or a bad thing for the industry. I was firmly arguing the case for the former as I saw nothing but opportunity and exciting challenges in digital publishing and had made it my business to learn as much as I could about that side of the business. For me, it was the first time that digital had been discussed in terms of the effect on our culture and reading habits. It raised issues much wider than simply ‘How do we market ebooks?’. It raised questions about whether people would still be reading in fifty years’ time and what we could and should do as an industry to ensure that they would be.
What has Byte the Book meant for you?
Karen and I have been friends for years and had been discussing the possibility of setting up an independent publishing company for some months before we attended the first Byte the Book event. Justine Solomons and the Byte the Book environment really helped to give us the push we needed, and we founded Red Button in August 2012. The networking events have played a crucial part in our work since then. Despite having nearly three decades of publishing experience between us, there was, and always will be, so much to learn about running a small press. We do all our own editorial, formatting, design and production work, as well as our distribution and marketing, so being able to consult a network of professionals is invaluable. Hearing professionals from other media industries like the music business and magazine publishing has also really helped to shed light on the challenges of dealing with a digitising world and thrown up some interesting ideas for the future. And regularly attending Byte the Book events has led us to some fantastic writers − including Chris!
How has digital publishing affected the relationship between author and publisher?
One of the crucial changes in the last few years has been the rise of the author. Authors have always been at the heart of books, but they haven’t always been at the heart of publishing. For example, London Book Fair was once chiefly an industry event, but now authors are actively encouraged to attend and there is a programme of events designed for them. Authors no longer need publishers to get their work out there. One of our key challenges is to make them want to work with a publisher, and that changes the dynamic significantly. As a small publisher, we’re able to work very closely with all our authors. They are involved at all stages and as a result we hope that we offer a much more personal experience than larger publishers. I think this is exciting for both writers and publishers alike, but also for readers, who not only have more choice than ever before, but who find it much easier to access their favourite authors online and through social media. Byte the Book really encapsulates this change − at every event, writers and industry professionals are networking and making books happen.
Mockstars is now available to buy. Visit www.MockstarsTheNovel.com to find out more.
For more titles from Red Button visit www.redbuttonpublishing.net.
Buy this book.
Review by Tracey Sinclair.
The first novel in the Cormoran Strike series was overshadowed by the media furore when ‘Robert Galbraith’ was unhappily outed as a pseudonym for none other than JK Rowling. But in the fuss over who knew, who told and whether it even mattered, what was too often lost was the fact that The Cuckoo’s Calling was a solid, seriously enjoyable crime thriller which, in private detective Cormoran Strike and his resourceful assistant Robin, introduced a couple of original and compelling characters who inhabit a beautifully evoked London landscape.
This enterprising, if mismatched, pair returns in this second Galbraith outing, which is every bit as page turningly readable as the first. Galbraith’s murder mysteries are old fashioned in the best sense, a breath of fresh air for those of us who are a little tired of contemporary crime novels which imply there’s a serial killer lurking round every corner. As in The Cuckoo’s Calling, the focus is on one death and the narrowing down of a pool of colourful suspects, here drawn from the eccentric world of publishing, which Rowling obviously knows well enough to affectionately skewer (though indie writers may chafe at her characterisation of the breed as barely literate fantasists writing erotic nonsense - that EL James success really stung, eh, Joanne?). While the murder here is more graphic and gothic than in the first novel, the plot avoids so many of the implausible twists and coincidences of the modern crime book and is a chunky, satisfying read.
Despite displaying a talent for deft, elegant prose that may surprise those who dismissed the Harry Potter books as clunkily written, there are instances where the story falls into cliché (for an overweight, dishevelled, partially disabled detective whose wiry hair gave him the school nickname ‘pube head’, Strike nevertheless has an impressive hit rate with improbably beautiful women). And while his assistant, Robin, is never reduced to a supporting character – her interior life is as fleshed out as her boss’s – the fact that whatever conflict arises between them could be easily solved if they had an honest conversation can start to grate. But these are small niggles in a series which has, in only two novels, already established itself as one of the best additions to the crime genre in recent years.
Tracey Sinclair is a freelance editor, writer and indie author. Her latest book is A Vampire in Edinburgh and can be purchased here.
The Children’s Media Conference has announced that Jonny Mitchell will deliver the Opening keynote speech on Wednesday 2 July in Sheffield.
Mr. Mitchell is Headteacher of Thornhill Community Academy, the schoolwhich featured in Channel 4’s acclaimed documentaryEducating Yorkshire.
To make it easier for you to get to the CMC, we have negotiated a reduced rate pass of £255+ VAT, a saving of £85 + VAT.
Email info@bytethebook.com for your discount code.
The CMC runs from 2-4 July 2014 and will be welcoming over 900 delegates from radio, TV, interactive media, games, licensing, toys, book and magazine publishing, and arts and museums - with speakers from all those sectors and beyond. There’s no better place to better engage with kids’ content and the kids’ audience: Children’s Media Conference
This year a new focus on EdTech brings together digital learning and kids content: http://www.thechildrensmediaconference.com/events/learningheart/
Sparks flew at June’s Byte The Book event, much to the delight of the packed crowd at The Ivy. Locking horns on the topic of effective marketing strategies were publishing consultant Chris McVeigh, Marketing Director at Orion Books Mark Rusher and bestselling self-published author Mark Edwards.
Host Justine Solomons thanks June sponsors Autharium (sitting to the right in the front row).
Mark Edwards opened the floor by reflecting on how he and his writing partner Louise Voss have managed to sell over 300,000 eBooks between them, without the assistance of a publisher. He stressed that authors must approach marketing professionally in order to master its two most vital elements: 1) Finding your audience, and 2) Getting in front of them. He recommended that writers identify similar authors in their genre and find ways to connect with their readership, perhaps via reciprocal guest-blogging. The reader cross-pollination that tends to follow from this process can help new authors appear in ‘If you liked this…’sections, and as a result effectively “follow other books up the charts”. Experiment and innovate constantly, Mark added, evaluating what works and what doesn’t (Mark noted that subtly adjusting the amount of peril in his online copy, for instance, caused his book to shoot up the charts).
Justine Solomons and panellists, right to left, Chris McVeigh, Mark Rusher and Mark Edwards.
Mark Rusher, who recently won a Bookseller Award for his marketing of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, added that in the current climate you need an extremely compelling central idea to rise above the noise. Gone Girl resonated widely with its central premise that “you can never trust the person you live with”, and readers were hooked from the start.Interestingly, Gillian herself shies away from social media, but her publishers worked tirelessly to ensure that every opinion former in the industry was talking about the novel. Even when it sold in huge quantities - in fact, especially when it did - the relentless marketing continued apace because, perhaps dishearteningly, it will always be easier to sell 200,000 copies of a smash hit than even 10,000 copies of an unknown debut. In all, nine separate print editions of Gone Girl were released to the public, keeping them interested, and keeping them buying.
A full crowd listening to the panel.
It was when Chris McVeigh took the floor that things began to get heated. Chris slammed what he saw as a lack of strategy among mainstream publishers, criticising them for publishing too many titles and employing a “crapshoot approach”to marketing (i.e. treading the same ground with every book and occasionally lucking out on a hit). He added that it was easy for Orion to impose a “retrospective narrative”of success on Gone Girl, but in reality they were simply repeating the same tired process they employ for every release. Publishers, he emphasised, need to grasp simple marketing platforms such as SEO, citing the rather alarming fact that if you Google “poetry”you won’t find a major publisher’s website until at least page four.
There were loads of questions from the floor.
Top marketing tips that closed the discussion included the importance of getting your pitch right, analysing your sales data, finding what works for you and rejecting what doesn’t (if you hate Twitter, for example, don’t spend hours forcing yourself to use it - it will show in your content). Chris summed up by advising authors that, with marketing, “you either live it or you don’t”. No one can tell you the right way to market your book, because the story’s different every time.
Words by Chris Russell, photos by Dean Samways.
If you enjoyed this report why not join us at The Club at The Ivy on Monday 14th July 2014 .
Review by Tracey Sinclair.
Buy this book here.
A woman wakes up in hospital, not knowing where she is or how she got there. She is introduced to children she doesn’t remember, a family that isn’t hers – and, the next day, the whole process begins again, only this time it’s a different family… An old man reeling from his wife’s terminal cancer distracts himself with a job as a handyman in a local care home, only to start suspecting that, whatever is going on inside this suspiciously deserted building, ‘care’ isn’t the right description.
Rebekah Lattin-Rawstone’s superbly chilling debut takes a universal subject – the fear of being old, abandoned and helpless – as the basis of a smart horror that serves both as a stinging indictment on how we treat the elderly in our society as well as a truly gripping story (I breathlessly devoured the last few chapters at a breakneck pace, so desperate was I to find out how it ended). True, the plot may at times be far-fetched – you wonder just how sustainable the home’s sinister plot would be in reality – and Lattin-Rawstone is better at voicing her older characters than her younger ones (the book’s lone teenager was slightly unconvincing, and far less nuanced than the figures that surrounded her, though in fairness she was always viewed through the lens of other, not always sympathetic, characters), but overall the multiple narrators are deftly woven together into a compelling tale, where often the small evils, borne of selfishness and neglect, are as quietly horrifying as the larger crimes.
This isn’t a book of ‘jump out of your seat’ scares, preferring to artfully structure a growing sense of dread that takes hold of you and simply refuses to let go. The result is a story that will get under your skin and stay with you long after you read it.
Tracey Sinclair is a freelance editor, writer and indie author. Her latest book is A Vampire in Edinburgh and can be purchased here.
Kingston Writing School have just launched a short story competition judged by the multi-award winning Hilary Mantel.
1st prize is £3,000 and there are two runner up prizes of £500. The winner will also have the opportunity to have his/her work considered for publication by Kingston University Press. Shortlisted and winning stories will be published in a Winners Anthology. There is an entry fee £10 per story and an upper word limit of 5000 words. Closing date is June 30th 2014. More details here.
