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

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

Almost every story I ever wrote had a dragon of some sort in it. What pisses me off slightly is that dragons in stories always seem to be either:
a) Big, fearsome, impressive and deeply evil.
or
b) Small, cute-looking, pink or purple, and good.
That's why the dragons in my stories are big, impressive, fearsome, and good (generally), but cute they are not. They are also never pink. One is purple, but she's also fifty-seven feet long with very sharp teeth, so that makes up for it.

A series you might like is Temeraire by Naomi Novik. It's set in the Napoleonic Wars (well, parallel Napoleonic Wars), but as well as armies and navies (navys? What is the plural of 'navy', anyway?) there are air forces of dragons.

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is navies.

Also, if your beasts rode into battle on horseback, dismounted, then fought, would they be dragoon dragons?

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I dunno, dragons on horseback ... it might get kind of ridiculous.

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

That was good! But:
A) It could be a smaller dragon
B) The dragon might be able to help the poor horse what with the lift available with its wings.
C) Hey, who'd mess around with that horse?

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

Nice pun. My dragons would probably stick to eating horses, though.

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read The Two Princesses of Bamarre? There is a really interesting dragon character in that book.

Apparently, the only thing dragons hate more than humans is other dragons, but they get lonely, so sometimes they keep humans as pets for their amusement; they always end up eating them in the end, even if they regret it because afterwards they miss their pets.

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

I've never even heard of that book, but it sounds quite interesting so I'll have a look for it.

[purebristles.livejournal.com]

Gail Carson Levine, I think. It's not bad, but Ella Enchanted was better. Ella was made into a bad movie. The Two Princesses of Barmarre was... badly edited I think. Plot was very flabby.

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

I like Ella Enchanted.

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

Wow, Tealin, I knew that you had a lot of readers who read a lot of great fantasy; I didn't realize that they also were writers of fantasy themselves! How cool is that, are they, and are you?? (bows obsequiously)

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's not as if any of them have been published. Thanks anyway, though.

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

Hey, if all the most talented, accomplished people were all actually recognized by the world as such...? Well, it would be a very different world! Many of my best friends are unemployed actors, artists, writers, etc. that are so talented...the fact that you do it at all, especially in your spare time, without pay, totally impresses me! My brother writes fiction- he's a lot better at writing than I am. If you or anyone else would like to see what he writes, I could steer you his way (if not that's ok too).