Book Covers

A book cover can and should be a work of good pop art, put out into the world, published enjoyed by people. While you read a book, whether it takes you a day or a week, you have it out in your life, on the chair or bed, for everyone to see. It should grab their eyes and make an impression. I work on that. Some of mine are clearly better than others.

I am about to go through all my book covers and redo the ones I can. When I do, I will put my best pop art on them. In a general sense my goal is to use the best of pop art so that, of my thirty times two or so of covers, all are my best work. There are a few complications.

In general, since almost all my books are 6 X 9, all my covers are about that size. The biggest complication is that choosing to put the art on there without the title, subtitle, and author's name (because after all you can put that on the spine), is, I think, taking a chance. I have done that but have not been happy with the appearance. One author asked me why I left my own name off of Pile of Leaves: Stories of a Rake since I was the rake in question, and I had to admit, it was really for pop design reasons but not anything I'd really thought through carefully. I have one book, Comin' 'Round to Lovin' It, which even at this moment has no words on its title, although probably it should, and it even has a cool subtitle (23 short stories out of 99 billion served) which gives people a little chuckle. I have now swung around the other way to decide that books should have all three, title, subtitle, and author, on the cover, if at all possible, with whatever you put on the spine as a kind of bonus, which helps it when it's in its shelf, tucked away, not being read.

The question, then, to me, is, should the design lead your eyes to the words? Or should it whack you in the face and make you read the words separately? Does it help if the words are last (bottom right if possible) - or is it better if you get the words, or some of them, before you even look at the picture? Are smaller fonts more annoying in terms of interfering with the impression of the art, because you can't read them without effort? My questions here have more to do with strategy. I have a lot of covers to redo, and my last question is this: Do I need an overall brand/look to tie all thirty of them together? Or is it ok to have outlliers that really don't look like the rest?