(This is not a comment on you, personally, but on our general perceptions of the society we live in.)
]]>Similarly, I've passed over SATURN'S CHILDREN few times when trying to decide which of your books to buy next, since I feel like less of a tool handing ATROCITY ARCHIVES to the cashier than something with a CG sex-kitten on the cover.
Sadly, I imagine that for every one person they drive off with prominent mammaries they pick up another ten. I still wonder how these decisions get made, though.
]]>I'm afraid you've just hit on one of the critical errors in book-marketing theory. Every single one of the numerically based, scientifically flawed studies that has been done that concludes "ya gotta touch it before you'll consider buying it" has been done on consumable items, like cereal. The publishing industry has never confirmed whether reading material — a nonconsumable item — is part of the same population; or, for that matter, that the study population corresponds to the bookstore population that is influenced by cover and not by author name; and so on.
Then, too, there's an unstated assumption in Our Gracious Host's description of the publishing industry's cover meme: That the end consumer is actually the person who is the target of the cover designs. Last summer's racial CoverFail over Liar is merely an obvious example. Further investigation demonstrated to my satisfaction — and I have pretty high standards in this regard — that the particular cover meme espoused by Bloomsbury USA's marketing dorks was in response to specific comments made by the head chainstore buyer for one of the top three US bookstore chains*... and a cursory examination of the "featured books" tables at that chain even today only confirms it. In short, that particular element of CoverFail is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another, somewhat older, example is the US trade nonfiction meme that "green covers don't sell." Well, why not? Where does that meme come from? It's a leftover from 1960s ink chemistry, bookstore design and palettes, and old fluorescent lighting, which together combined to make a green cover printed from nondigital plates wash out into mud in too many stores. Given that no store or trade book falls fits all of these criteria today... draw your own conclusion.
All of that said, I think Our Gracious Host's description of his role in the cover is both correct and admirably succinct, and I don't think that he's trying to pretend that it reflects the reality of the substance of cover design — only the reality of the process of cover design.
@79: I noticed Charlie on the cover - I say more authors should try and sneak into their covers! Lets hope he makes a pixelated return for rule 34.
]]>My problem with the US cover of Saturn's Children is that it's not funny enough. As was pointed out upthread, as a joke it's too subtle for marketing purposes. If the US publishers wanted to go funny, they needed to go for a visual joke that can be picked up in only a second or two, and even from a dozen feet away. Drawing Freya in a blatant manga style in a pose or situation that suggested that she was being made love to by a spaceship � with the implication that it was only symbolic � would have done the job nicely, I think.
]]>(Also note that there are probably character set translations going on. The web runs on HTML entities, the server is running Debian (which may be trad ASCII for all I know), my web browser runs OS/X (UTF-8), and Cthulhu only knows what character set various versions of Windows are using. If you type something that looks like an em-dash on your PC it may get translated a couple of times before it gets stashed in the MySQL database ... or not.)
]]>... Cthulhu only knows what character set various versions of Windows are using.No. I'm afraid that differing character sets is something that frightens even the old ones. My first thesis was required to be done on the university IBM timeshare system — and thus, it was coded in EBCDIC. And it could be WordPerfect 4.2's alternate-character support system, which (despite its comprehensiveness in those pre-ISO-character-set days) was not supported by anything else (that's what my second thesis was required to be in).
At least it wasn't WordStar!
]]>I've had a book cover changed after feedback on the ARC from the big chain buyers.
Given the way modern short-run printing costs break down, it ought to be possible for a publisher to do A/B testing on cover designs -- take a hardcover with a projected 6000 copy run and do two dust jackets at 3000 each, see which comes back more frequently in the returns, and pick the other design for the paperback. (The only downside I can see might be confusion and pushback from the stores, but it ought to be possible to negotiate with them -- the goal would be to increase overall sales, after all.)
]]>Because it's not just any buyer for B&N -- it's the manager in charge of acquiring SF for the entire chain. If they take against a book on the basis of the cover, the book's sales will slump 30%. And the sales of the subsequent book will be lower, too, because the author's sales track record is showing a downward curve.
]]>I still think space is really cool.
And I hope you enjoy DUST.
]]>What, you mean under-funded, dirt-cheap, run by a corps of talented people who are dedicated to public service rather than self-enrichment, and delivering overall superb results in spite of obstacles placed in their way by ideologues who think the free market is always the best way of serving needs -- even when those needs are for not-easily-quantifiable goods such as public health or the seach for knowledge?
Here's a hint: you're an idiot, and further comments along such lines will get your ass banned from this blog.
(The Owner.)
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