The cover-reveal I posted the other day of my upcoming novel turned out to be a big fat—if unintended— lie. The above is the final cover for Bully 4 Love: A Rather Odd Love Story, which I plan to release on May 7th. Rather than this one, which I posted the other day.
Book covers are strange creatures. Although they are supposed to prove that the well-worn adage, You can’t tell a book by its cover, is itself a lie, often that is just not the case. If a single image could tell you about a book, you probably wouldn’t need to write the damn book. What a book cover is supposed to do is grab your attention and tease you, often, at times, with a bit of deception. Are the bare-chested hunks on the cover of romance novels really that hunky and devoid of chest hairs?
Are the sexy women on the covers of pulp novels and paperbacks truly that sexy and owners of capacious bras under the covers?
Those are extreme cases, but I think they make a point.
Genre fiction—you know, science fiction, mysteries, horror, supernatural, fantasy, westerns, and a chest-full of romances—is by its nature usually plot-driven. And covers for genre novels often feature illustrations that give a relatively accurate view of the contents of the book, despite the extremes mentioned above. There are often specific scenes and incidents for a book illustrator and designer to draw on for inspiration. That’s not always the case for recent covers of mainstream, realistic, literary novels. They tend to be abstract, relying more on creative typography in the rendition of the title than anything too specific to the story.
As my upcoming novel is a mainstream novel and as realistic as fiction ever gets—being the art of creative lying—I felt it should have a cover that makes that point clear. There are no creatures or monsters in Bully 4 Love. Nor spaceships and aliens; time and dimension traveling; supernatural anythings, or even modern-day Knight Errants righting wrongs. All of which have populated some of my other fiction. Instead, like By the Sea,
my first novel in what I’m calling my Love, Sex, and Pursuit of Happiness Novels, Bully 4 Love is rooted in reality. It mostly takes place in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, specifically in Pasadena and South Pasadena. I was born in Pasadena. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. No, Bully 4 Love is not autobiographical. And yet, might it have been?
In the world of indie digital publishing—the world I happily reside in—there have risen many book cover illustrators and designers to service our needs. But most of them, or at least the ones I’ve run across, seem to be most adept at covers for genre fiction. And why not? Most of their clientele, I would guess, write genre fiction. In any case that what Juan Padron, the designer of the cover of my last novel, Creature Feature, features as his forte on his website.
I went to Juan because I admired the work he did on the covers of Jean Rabe’s Piper Blackwell mystery novels.
I came up with the basic concept for Creature Feature's cover—as I do for all my books—and then let Juan take it from there. What he designed looks great, and definitely seems to grab people’s attention.
But for Bully 4 Love I felt I had to do more than come up with a concept, I needed to pre-visualize (as our friends in filmmaking might say) the cover. Using the software on AuthorLab I took a crack at designing what I wanted. After a couple of attempts, I came up with a cover I liked. In fact, I liked it so much, I thought, well, why not go with this?
Unfortunately, being an amateur designer steeped not in a breadth of experience, I discovered that there is more to designing a cover that just the surface image. When I came to completing the design by adding the back cover and the spine for the paperback edition, I found that AuthroLab had no software for that (although they say they soon will). So, I called upon Juan to rescue me. I found out that there were some technical specifications for digital book covers that my cover did not meet. So—back to being a pre-visualization.
Juan ran with my pre-visualization and made a visual treat. It’s not just that he took care of the technical specification, he brought his creative eye, his designer's talent to the task and made a silk purse out of a—well, you know.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I love a pro! Cheers, Juan!
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