book covers
Books have been getting a lot of bad press lately. According to Penn America’s website, pen.org, more than 16,000 book bans have been implemented in U.S. public schools since 2021, 4,000 of which occurred in the 2023-2024 school year alone—more than at any other time since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Public libraries have been under assault as well, with many people questioning their relevance and even advocating for their closure.
Estimates vary as to when books as we know them were first produced, but for the majority of time since the middle of the 15th century, when the invention of the printing press made them available to common people, books were considered precious objects by those who owned them.
The idea that books were treasures held true well into the 20th century, a fact I was reminded of recently when I pulled a few antique volumes off of a shelf in my living room. These clothbound gems, a couple of which were published in the mid-1800s, are marvels to behold.
The first in a two-volume set, Ruins of Ancient Cities by Charles Bucke, published in 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York, features a detailed etching of ancient Athens across from its title page. The indentations made by the printing press on the book’s pages can still be seen if you look at its elegant serif typeset at just the right angle, a reminder that someone painstakingly set the type for all 360 pages by hand, a feat of craftsmanship few people living today could accomplish without error.
Perhaps even more impressive is Everyman’s Library: A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin. Published by E.P. Dutton & Co. of New York in 1910, the book’s endpapers feature a gorgeous, scrolling Edwardian design complete with a rendering of the Roman goddess Flora who symbolizes abundance. The publisher’s advertisement for the rest of the Everyman series at the beginning of the book is just as lovely, its type arranged to resemble a stylized tulip.
In my mind’s eye, I can picture the families who once owned these books, sitting in their living rooms, reading passages to one another aloud. Back when these hardcovers were published, reading often felt like an adventure. These books were prized possessions, not just because of their content, but because they were well made, beautiful to look at, and expensive to buy. Books like these said something about the people on whose shelves they were stored.
With their flimsy cover stock and recycled paper pages, modern-day print books, by contrast, often feel disposable. And although they are convenient to buy and read, and better for the environment, electronic books are like ghosts even in comparison to these, gone at the touch of a button.
Of course, the format of modern books makes them affordable and widely available to large numbers of readers. And the myriad types of other media readily accessible online makes it unlikely that books will ever regain the status they once enjoyed on a large scale.
Not unlike the American Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a […]
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We usually wait to share book reviews for our interview days here at Writer Unboxed, but this morning our dear friend and one of my two extremely appreciated assistant editors, Vaughn Roycroft, received his first review. And I just can’t help but share it, and not just because I know how much heart and perseverance went into this series for Vaughn, but because I just can’t help but think YOU would also want me to share it as well.
Bonus: The FINAL cover is revealed at the end.
Email readers, you can access the YouTube video, titled, One of the best self-published fantasies I’ve read: Vaughn Roycroft’s The Severing Son, directly HERE.
Enjoy!
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The German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag wrote Die Technik des Dramas, a definitive study of the five-act dramatic structure, or arc, in which he laid out what has come to be known as Freytag’s pyramid. Under Freytag’s pyramid, the plot of a story consists of five parts. (Definition paraphrased from Wikipedia).
1. Backstory/Exposition: The story begins in late January, 2020, when the debut novelist (nine months out from pub day) hears an international news piece about contagion on cruise ships. The author is on a cruise ship; a three-week trip around South America. The ship staff have protocols—lifeboat drills and announcements, outside doors locked in high seas. The author lines up with the other passengers, and like obedient preschoolers they insert hands into a portable spray-sanitizer station before returning onboard after shore excursions. She finds the delay an inconvenience, the alcohol gel irritating. She starts to carry scented hand cream. The term “Legionnaires disease” circulates and goes away. From Buenos Aires, the author telephones a foundation in France to secure the use of a photograph from 1930 for cover artwork. At sea, she is frantic for a good internet connection; final blurbs are trickling in, the cover design is finalized, and the title font.
Then, somewhere near the Falkland Islands, there is a new page up on Amazon, with her own name and a preorder link for her book. The author drinks free shipboard Champagne and Googles her title over and over and each time it hits she feels a little thrill. She posts photographs of the cover design on her Instagram page along with whales and seals and by then, the cruise is over and she returns home, anxious to begin pre-publication marketing of her debut novel.
Inciting Incident: CNN reports about a ‘wet market’ and pangolins, and the world gets stranger and stranger. “Those poor authors who have books coming out in June!” the author laments, with shallow sympathy and large-but-silently selfish relief, that her book does not come out until August 2020, and all this virus foolishness will be old news.
The author has a live reading with a poet in late February, in a bookshop, and tells herself that by August and launch time, she will have her talking points and gestures down. She orders a Great Outfit for the book festival talk, along with mounted posters of her book cover to stand in the background behind the podium. The Great Outfit is expensive; a little edgy-in-a-good-way, and she rationalizes that it will help her feel confident at public appearances.
2. Rising action: By March, signs of spring are appearing, but the author’s focus is not on her garden. The news is sobering. Dr. Fauci is introduced into the plot. The author worries about elder loved ones and is afraid to get on a plane and fly halfway across the country and stay in a hotel and mingle with thousands of people in a convention center. Thousands of attendees back out, thousands vow to go anyway. She cancels attending AWP at the last minute. She feels bad for the members of her speaking panel, but they replace her easily.
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At the Pont Alexandre III over the Seine in Paris, January 1, 2022. Image – Getty iStockphoto: Marina113
‘I’m Tired of My Ego’
That’s become one of my favorite lines of 2022, a young year that already feels three decades long. “I’m tired of my ego.”
This sentiment was shared by a Christian artist who is referred to, Madonna-like, by a single name, Lecrae. (He might begin by trying to remember a first or last name.) I ran across his confession while researching recent marketplace uses of the term ego. Lecrae, who is a 42-year-old Texan, “spent the weekend posting photos and videos of himself at the SoFi Stadium” during the You Know What Bowl. Friends later “humbled him,” Lecrae graciously conceded, according to Jeannie Ortega Law at the Christian Post.
I’d been set thinking about the place and purpose and potentials of ego by our columnist at Publishing Perspectives, Richard Charkin. Just in time for the onset of the first hand-over-fist awards-news season of this year, Charkin handed me a column we headlined Richard Charkin on ‘LitFlation’: Prizes, Awards, and Egos.
Charkin, the former chief of London’s Bloomsbury Publishing (of JK Rowling fame), writes about book and publishing awards in that piece, “The only impact seems to be to inflate — more inflation — the egos of recipients. When will this inflation ever end? When will publishers’ egos be large enough? When will we spend as much time and effort supporting our authors, particularly when they’re under attack, as we spend on parading against our peers and competitors?”
While Charkin, a publisher, generously points to publishers’ egos as being a driver in the jungle of these many honors, we in the news media also see a certain amount of primo ego in the administrations of some of the awards, themselves, because we’re the ones who hear from their PR agents. I always hope they’ll include a bottle Chanel’s Égoïste with a press release.
To give you a look at the proliferation of these awards on the international scene, in the 35 publication days since January 3, we’ve published 34 awards stories, just shy of one per day. These are jury lists, longlists, shortlists, winners’ lists, and a few stories about awards issues, as in the European Writers’ Council’s decision to withdraw as an administrative body in the European Union Prize for Literature. There are, as I write this, 12 more awards stories in our editorial calendar’s queue, all vying for publication. New ones arrive daily. Some simply won’t make it. We’re not Awards Perspectives. The news cycle is very high.
One insight into the field is found in such self-flattery as “the best-loved award” of a given genre. There’s an awards program that actually graces itself with that unknowable attribute in its press releases. Is that a clue to who the prize’s administrators are thinking about? Is it the authors and publishers they commend?
Much of this has to do with the necessary oxygen of visibility, of course, and that means news coverage. If an award is juried, longlisted, shortlisted, and conferred, and nobody reads about it in the press, has a tree fallen in the […]
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A good writer can transform any idea into a captivating, intriguing story. In writing, masterful execution can compensate for a mediocre idea.
You couldn’t say the same about book cover design as it’s, first and foremost, a marketing tool.
A proper cover should target a book’s genre, cater to your target audience’s preferences, and intrigue the viewer. A good idea — the main pillar of an effective cover design — helps achieve that.
So
As a writer, you have two challenges:
Here at MiblArt – book cover design company, we can help you with both challenges.
If you ever struggled with a book cover idea or were unsure about the ones you have, we can provide you with ideas and consulting for free.
MiblArt team works with any fiction and nonfiction genres and has already helped dozens of authors get the covers that do their books justice.
As for the book cover design itself, we offer
Take a look at the cover examples we have recently done.
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What’s the most challenging thing for you during the book cover design process? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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