The Mysteries of Cover Art

[tealin]

As I may have mentioned in the past, my now ex-roommate is a sales rep for a publisher/book distributor. This means the house is full of books and nearly everyone she knows gets plied with advance copies of new releases to read and comment on. One of the books that recently ended up in my posession was The Floating Island, a YA fantasy novel that just so happened to be illustrated by Brett Helquist. I managed to read it in small spurts over the course of a few months, and ... it was OK. (...probably would have been better if I'd given it some real time...) It's the sort of quasi-fantasy that I tend to favour ('magical realism' I think it's called) and the world seems fairly well-imagined and original but it's not very dimensional, if that makes any sense. Same goes for most of the characters. Like I said, this may be because I never got 'into' it, by reading it in such a piecemeal fashion, but perhaps if I had been grabbed by very real characters and situations I'd have felt more inclined to read it all in one go.

Anyway, the point of this post: I was recently in a bookstore and saw The Floating Island on display, but it had a different cover. ARCs often don't have the final cover art but if they bother to print them in full colour on nice heavy cover paper, that's generally what they stick with. This was a very different cover. Not only was it not a Helquist cover, but it had a dragon on it. It had been a while since I'd finished the book so my memory was a little hazy, but I was pretty sure it didn't have any dragons. It does have Fire Pirates, a ghost, dwarfs, sailors, a magic box, a curse, a king, a mermaid, and a talking cat, but what it does not have is dragons. Or even a dragon. It is most perplexing. Do dragons sell? Have the marketing people even read the book? What will people think when they get to the end and realise they never encountered a dragon through the whole thing? Or was the main character rewritten in the months between ARC release and public release to be a dragon?

The ARC cover

The Final Cover

Comments

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

Oh wow - I haven't seen that artwork in a few decades: we used to have a big poster in my bedroom of that! I was too young to realize that there was an controversy, although I was vaguely aware that this artwork did not strictly interpret the subjects of the book. I feel weird, because I have very strong feelings about how the author should be given far more creative control over their book covers than they are...but man, I really like this art! Always have! Even if it has a lot of weird stuff like Emus, for me, it really does conjure up the feel of the books (as well as Tolkein's original, highly stylized, almost symbolic illustrations), with its many fantastic creatures (at least some of which are depicted in the book, like Shelob, the Wraiths' steeds, etc.), black and red tones (dark, evil, fire, time of war, etc.), and the highly stylized treatment of everything - almost primitive in its simplicity - suggesting something set in prehistory, or in early gothic, medieval times (reminds me of some of the stained glass windows, tapestries, etc. from the period) - in a way, it's perfect to me in that it gives the reader a good idea of what tone to expect without ruining the specifics of the plot details. But you may all feel free to disagree...