Monday, June 25, 2007

Evolution of Another Book Cover Design


Riffing off my prior blog entry, here's more from Jenny Crusie on book cover design.

This time she's discussing another collaborative book she has coming out, The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, a novel written with two other bestselling women authors, Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart.

This entry is interesting for several reasons. First, Crusie discusses the differing considerations involved when a book is in mass-market paperback (a much smaller canvas for the cover designer than hardcover or trade paperback). Second, this book's cover went through many more changes than the cover of Agnes and the Hitman, the subject of Crusie's earlier blog entry. Third, the publisher (St. Martin's Paperbacks) allowed them to go through eleven (count 'em, 11) drafts before settling on the final cover--over which the authors apparently had final approval.

Of course, Crusie alone packs a lot of selling power, and adding Dreyer and Stuart to the package means the publisher is anticipating very big sales numbers for this book. It's the Golden Rule: She who has [brings in] the gold makes the rules.

Closing thoughts:
1. Jenny Crusie has two books coming out this summer--The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, written with Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart, in June; Agnes and the Hitman, written with Bob Mayer, in August. She is currently working on a solo book (working title Always Kiss Me Goodnight), good news for the Crusie-holics among us (myself included).

2. Crusie's very cyber-wise and has websites for each of the new books as well as her own website and her blog. (For links to the individual book sites, go to her blog--the links run across the top of the blog page.)

5 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

Sounds like Crusie has become an industry unto herself.

minus273 said...

Who or what is Rodrigo & why is he typing Spanish?What have you been up to Ms. Sphinx?

RK Sterling said...

How interesting. I bought that book a week or so ago, but have been too busy to read it. It's funny, because I was analyzing the cover design even before I read this post, just because I thought they did a good job with the artwork even though you might not necessarily guess what the book was about by the cover.

RK Sterling said...

PS: from what I can gather, Rodrigo wants to sell you personalized t-shirts. I'd have to check out his site though to tell if that's Portuguese or Italian - it isn't Spanish though it's close. The three languages are so similar I can usually understand them. Do you know what it is? I'm guessing Portuguese, even though "mais" is also Italian.

Sphinx Ink said...

Charles, Crusie has indeed become an industry in herself. Must be nice! She has worked for it, and is a good writer.

minus273 and kate s, at first I thought Rodrigo was a spambot that found my blog, but in clicking on the link in the message I discovered he has his own blog. My guess is that Rodrigo is writing in Portuguese--it's definitely not Italian, nor is it Spanish, although it shares elements of both. As kate s suggests, he is selling personalized T-shirts.

Perhaps I'll send Blogger a complaint about him, since he's apparently trying to sell me stuff. I don't think that's allowed on Blogger. I'll check the rules and see.

Of course, since I don't know Portuguese (except insofar as I can compare its words to Latin, English, French, or Spanish), I don't know exactly what his post says.