Good Cover Art Gone Bad

On the whole, I think that the cover art by Daniel Dos Santos for Green by Jay Lake (US, UK, Canada, Indiebound, review) is quite good. It’s the kind of cover art that would make me pick up the book to see what it’s about – and I think it’s something that would likely appeal to a wide-ranging audience (even though it still somewhat fails the ‘would I want people to see me reading this in public’ test).

Then, I read the book. The character featured on the cover is the main character of the novel, also named Green. Yes, she is an adolescent girl, yes she cuts her face beneath a pomegranate tree (though I don’t recall her hanging upside down). So it fits. Only in the book Green is a person of color. In the very least she has dark skin – I always pictured her with a South Asian appearance to match my perception of the country she was born in, but her descriptions in the book leaves her appearance pretty open aside from the consistent description of dark skin.

So, why is a cover that is otherwise a fairly good representation of the content of the book misleading about this small bit? I’ve seen Jay Lake mention on either Twitter or his blog that he likes the cover a lot – now is he just saying this because that’s what a good author does, or does this little inconstancy bother him. I think it would really bother me.

The assumption I jump to is that there is a perception that a person of color in the place of the nice white girl we have instead could reduce the sales of the book. True or not, that really rubs me the wrong way. If it is true, nothing is going to change until there are more people of color on covers (see Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin with cover art by Todd Lockwood). Or it could be that the cover artist didn’t know that Green was a person of color, which is entirely possible since he was likely given only a short excerpt to base the cover art on).

Thoughts?

A Tale of More than Two Covers – Contemporary

For this installment of my semi-regular discussion series on cover art, I’m going to cover the more modern/contemporary style that is often used. Generally I like this style more than a traditional one – it just feels better to me. I suspect that my primary reason for liking contemporary covers more is the stigma that I feel is often attached to SFF books and my insecurities about it – or to put it much more simply – I’m often embarrassed to be seen reading a book with a silly looking traditional SFF cover. When I’m reading a book with a more contemporary cover design, these insecurities go away – in fact something of the opposite effect results, possibly due to a perceived or imagined feel of intelligence or coolness associated with such a contemporary book.

To be fair and honest, I’m exaggerating the above emotional responses significantly; however, they are there. It’s simple enough to say that traditional covers often evoke negative feelings of self consciousness while contemporary covers are more likely to evoke positive feelings.

So, after all that rambling, let’s get to a few covers. We’ll start with the main point of this post – a couple of examples of contemporary styled covers that I like a lot.

David Rankine is the cover artist for the hardback publication of R. Scott Bakker’s books in The Prince of Nothing trilogy. Above are the covers for The Darkness That Comes Before and The Warrior Prophet. Both covers are well done in my opinion, but The Warrior Prophet certainly stands apart as the better of the two. The scroll-like script gives the feel of something ancient with a strong hint of the east with the similarity to Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese/Japanese. The well-chosen font and other patterns further enhance the feel from the cover, matching perfectly with the feel of the words from the books. This is cover art that works.

Chris Shamwana and Neil Lang created the above cover art for Vellum by Hal Duncan. While the initial glance at the cover is not as appealing as it is for The Warrior Prophet, the cover of Vellum does succeed, and the longer I look at it, the more strongly I believe it. The art is similar to that discussed above, especially with the use of script, but it soon becomes clear how much more is shown. The cover gives a sense of depth, of multiple levels within. The image of the hand and the use of red, orange, and black add a sense of unease, leaving a disturbing feeling – it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate cover for Vellum.

I had originally intended to leave this post as a discussion of only of the contemporary styled covers above, but fate would not allow it. The cover art by Todd Lockwood for the US release of The Bonehunters by Steven Erikson was released this week, and it screams for commentary.

Once again, the art is done very well, as seen in the full jacket cover before any text is added. With the addition of the badly chosen font, the art suffers greatly. The cover looks more like a Western rather than SFF; however the real travesty is matching this cover to The Bonehunters. While this is a recognizable scene within the book, it’s a very poor choice for the cover as it fails to match the book and the Malazan world at all. Do things look magical? Otherworldly? Even Ominous? No, this looks like nothing more than a wrecked stage coach. It’s simply amazing to see Tor appear to blatantly sabotage any chance of success for Erikson’s books.