So, DEAD: Snapshot--Portland, Oregon is out of my hands and in the pre-order queue. That is a good thing. And now my main focus is DEAD: Betrayal & Bloodshed, book 11 of the DEAD series. That is the working title, and is always subject to change as the book reveals itself to me, but I like the sound of it so far.
 |
| pre-order it HERE! |
That sort of brings me to my main question to ponder on a Monday. How much does the title of a book influence your interest? Or, unlike the common myth of books and covers, do you pre-judge a book by the artwork on the front? A really good example for me has been my That Ghoul Ava series. Many readers told me early covers made it look like a YA title.
Anybody who has read Ava knows that is not the case. And so, I have been working hard with my talented cover artist Andy Butnario to develop a cover that does her justice. The last book, Next, on a very special That Ghoul Ava was a home run in my opinion. And the early titles are being re-vamped in between all the other stuff I have Andy working on as well as his own personal projects. But that does beg the question about the importance of the cover art.
It is Monday, I have a ton of work to do, and...well, as I said, it's Monday. No need to get your brain gears bogged down with the whole week ahead of us. So, let's leave it at that...shall we?
A lot of modern cover art bugs me. It's either cartoonish or amateurish (often the case with small press) or really, really dull (to give it an impression of literary weight, I guess). A good example of the latter is the current edition of Stephen King's Skeleton Crew:
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com.au/books/about/Skeleton_Crew.html?id=_5U98wZ1DU8C&redir_esc=y
Contrast that with this cover from the 1980s:
http://smg.photobucket.com/user/panspersons/media/skelcrewking.jpg.html
I ask you, if you were a horror fan, which book would you pick up?