Cover Art

When I visited fellow blogger Andrew Leon over at StrangePegs yesterday, I had absolutely no idea that I was going to be treated to some fantastic art.  To clarify, he has an amazing looking cover for a manuscript he intends to publish that is not done by a professional artist (an artist who is known in the business for doing such things and charges who knows how much for it).  The author/artist who did Andrew's cover is Rusty Webb of The Blutonian Death Egg blog.

Just as a disclaimer, I want to say that I'm thinking Rusty's rates are pretty darn affordable and I suspect it has something to do with him being an ultra-nice guy.

Anyway...this got me to thinking about cover art and how important it is to have stuff on your cover that grabs the eye.   Let's take a look at a bunch of covers here:

First up is the cover for Andrew's work that is coming out.  

Okay...my gut reaction... Holy crap... I can't believe that this is a cover not put out by a Publishing House.

Here are the things that make my eyes spin:

1) The letters on the title are incredible. They are scary and draw my eye so effectively in that yellowish paint that I have to know what this story is about.

2) The ominous dark clouds behind the letters.  First it sets off the title beautifully. Second it scares the bejeezus out of me which I think is the reaction that one wants with this type of book.

3) The house looks lonely, forlorn, rundown, and well haunted.  And that makes it look terrifying. I'm thinking that this scene captures the exact essence of Halloween night. Wow.

Okay... Now I'm going to look at the cover for Rusty's own novella and comment about what I think of it.

First off...I've never been a fan of yellow but I think it works here.  I'm kind of in Michael Whelan's camp when it comes to the color yellow (he doesn't like it as a dominant color and neither do I).  However, yellow is loud...it screams... and that's exactly what I think is needed here and Rusty honed in upon it exactly.  Did I notice Rusty's brilliance when he debuted this cover? I thought it was pretty darn good, but not stunning like the one he did for Andrew.  So yeah, Andrew's cover is better in my opinion and is what prompted me to do this post.

Okay, next I'm going to look at a cover Patrick Dilloway designed on his blog for one of his self-published books.  Patrick is a hugely talented writer.  I read Where You Belong and gave it five stars.  But is he an artist? Hell no.  Take a looksee for yourself.

Patrick designed this cover for an upcoming project and it was one of two that we could kind of help him choose between on his blog.  Honestly though, a choice between this and the other is kind of like a choice between stale bread and a week-old biscuit. 

This is one of the reasons why I wanted a publisher. I had/have no talent to design a cover were I to self-publish.  Additionally, I don't really have a budget for it and I'm just going to say that this cover is kind of ugly.  I mean it's just a woman with a mask on looking down at her boobs and then the title sandwiched between her cleavage.  My thoughts when I saw this were, "If I self-publish, my cover will look like this and that just sucks."

Based exclusively off of this cover, I wouldn't buy this book. I know they say, "Don't judge a book by its cover," and I try not to, but yeah...it's hard to do.  I hope that Patrick goes with another cover or get's Rusty to do one (I strongly urge him to speak with Rusty).

Here's the cover for Where You Belong.  Same thing is going on here.  The book has so many awesome characters, so many cool scenes, locations from Arizona to New York, to Las Vegas to the frickin' Grand Canyon.  And the two men and one woman that are spoken of prominently in this book are absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.  So what kind of cover do we get?  Boring.

Yes, that's a coat hanger and a window and some sunlight and some faded curtains.  O.o

I don't really know what I'm supposed to feel when I look at this cover.  Maybe that Where You Belong deserves a better cover treatment than this.  Again, I urge Mutt to speak with Rusty Webb about this...like today.

Maybe he could qualify for a blog buddy discount or something.

Next up is Cindy Borgne the sci-fi authoress that brought us Vallar.  I loved Vallar...it's a damned good read (she's winning awards for it so I'm not the only one that thinks so) and her cover art is way better than Patrick's but not as good as Rusty's. 

I like this, but as I study it, the look is really computer generated.  I guess that's the way people do things these days.  However, this is way better than her first cover art. I don't want to offend her original cover artist but the original was just some red mountains, a stealth bomber, and a boy's ghostly face.  None of the elements really worked for me but I quickly moved past that and just read the book.  This at left...very eye catching and I like it.  But again...not as good as one done by Rusty Webb.

I love cover art. I possess two books by Michael Whelan that feature his incredible cover art and I've read the pages over and over to listen to his wisdom.  He, in my opinion, is the greatest cover artist to have ever lived and he's been lauded with Hugos galore, etc.  His paintings are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and when he passes, which unfortunately could happen any day, the originals will be worth millions of dollars and I will probably weep.

Michael Whelan has many things to say about cover art...he doesn't like the digital age, but most importantly, he stresses the need for the cover art to reflect the soul of the writer and he uses symbolism in all of his paintings.  I'm going to put some covers here so you can see what I'm talking about.

At left is the artist himself painting a picture of his daughter.  He does everything with paints...from watercolor, to acrylics, to oils.  Mostly though, he works in acrylic.  What a master of his craft.  Sigh.

I had a dream once when I was much younger that I wanted to meet Mr. Whelan and have him do a cover for a book I wrote. I know that will never happen.

The shape of Arkady's legs is meant to echo the fallen towers of Isaac Asimov's book.

He went with the ruins of a flying city to go against the grain of the flying city being so common in science-fiction.

Two books, The Snow Queen, and the Summer Queen.  Each symbol in the hats relates to something that happens in the book.  There is nothing present in the pictures that is not essential or at least covered in some part in the novel.  Pretty cool huh?

Anyway, this ends my post on cover art.  I hope you enjoyed it.

A Chat With Author Patrick Dilloway On "Where You Belong"

I finished Patrick's masterpiece Where You Belong just in time for Martin's A Dance With Dragons. And Patrick's book really is a masterpiece...I can't say enough good words about it. If you like literary fiction, this has it all. Loveable characters, tragedy, love, loss (a lot of tragedy actually), gay marriage, and incredible dialogue. The story is told through the dialogue and through the narrative of Frost Devereaux who is one of the most likeable voices I've had the good fortune to stumble upon. Anyway, Patrick (who keeps a blog here) allowed me to interview him (one of the perks of having a blog myself--squee).

THE INTERVIEW:

1) How would you define the literary fiction genre and what advice would you have for anyone that wanted to write a book similar to "Where You Belong"?

First off, thanks for interviewing me and I’m glad you enjoyed the book!

Some people define “literary fiction” as snobby or artsy or boring.  Mostly I think of it as books that put characters ahead of action.  It’s like “Tree of Life” versus “Transformers 3;” one is interested in the relationships between the characters and how they grow and the other is about giant robots beating each other up.

If you want to write literary fiction, the best advice is “Don’t!” because it’s not a very hot market.  You’re definitely not going to get rich off of it.  If you aren’t coming from a big writing program then you probably won’t even get noticed.  But if all that doesn’t deter you, then as with any genre you should read some of the masters.  There are the classics like Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and the Nab.  Then the more modern authors like my hero John Irving, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip Roth.  Or even more modern authors like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen.

2) How did you come up with the title?

The title of the first draft was “No Matter Who You Are” which was the name of a Bob Seger song.  For the second draft as I was writing my notes about what should happen and what it was about, I knew the main point was Frost finding where he belongs, so that became the title.

3) What kind of research did you do in order to get all the details in the book exactly the way you wanted them? For example, is there a KY Academy located in New York or did you base it off of something? CLAW is obviously a combination of the race riots of the sixties and the infamous protestors of the Westboro Baptist Church (which I thought was clever and made for a good villain).

I’m pretty sure there’s not a KY Academy anywhere.  I kind of hope not.  It’s a composite—and somewhat of a parody—of the private schools used in John Irving’s novels.  He bases his off his time at Exeter, so I guess mine would be somewhat loosely based on that.  I don’t remember any specific research about CLAW but it is largely based on Westboro and other radical right-wing groups.

My comment==>KY was a running joke in Dilloway's book because it was a school for many gay men to attend (all male student body) and the initials "K Y" smacked of the lubricant that is advertised on commercial television. I thought it was clever.

4) There are obviously many conflicts that you could have chosen for the book to revolve in and around. Why did you choose to center the conflict around the evolving definition of marriage and love? SPOILER ALERT: This book has several profoundly deep and meaningful gay relationships in it.

I wanted to find an issue that interested me and that I cared about and gay marriage was one that struck me right away because to me at least it’s such an obvious abuse of civil rights and the excuses detractors use are always so pitiful.  All they say is, “The Bible says…” or some nonsense about “Next people will want to marry trees!”  But I didn’t want to say those people are WRONG and DUMB because there’s not much of a book in it.  My take on it, which is somewhat cynical, is that it’s not about genitals; it’s about compatibility of the souls.  Hetero marriages blessed by God and all that fail all the time, to the point where in the US it’s about a fifty-fifty chance of it ending in divorce.

So then I needed to think of how to say that in a story.  One day the thought hit me, “What if a guy married a woman and then a man?”  That got the ball rolling.

5) Are the stakes much higher in this kind of genre? I noticed in reading it that oftentimes the conflicts in Frost's life had the worst possible outcome, i.e., death.

More than anything that’s another influence of John Irving.  You read books like “The World According to Garp” and “The Hotel New Hampshire” and “The Cider House Rules” and there’s always the presence of death in them.  Though I am a bit morbid too; Death is my favorite character in the Discworld series.

6) If you could have anyone alive today play Frost, Frankie, Frank, and Kaufmann...who would you choose for these roles in a big screen adaptation and why?

In all honesty I think I’ve given this question more consideration than any other.  The problem is that if I’m playing casting director is that I’d want actors in their early-mid 20s so they can play the characters from late teens into their 30s when the story ends.  I’m not all that familiar with who the best 20-something actors of today are, so it’s kind of tough.  But here goes.

Tobey as Frost would be awesome in my opinion.

Frost:  My first choice would be Tobey Maguire just because he was already in “The Cider House Rules” and Frost is based a lot off of Homer Wells.  The problem is that he’s probably too old to convincingly play the younger Frost.  Second choice would be Jesse Eisenberg/Michael Cera.  I think either of them (they’re interchangeable in my mind) has the same understated, easygoing vibe.  Dark horse would be Jon Foster, who was in “The Door in the Floor” (an adaptation of John Irving’s “A Widow for One Year”) and “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.”  He played the same type of character in both of those.  He’d probably be easier to get too.

I could see Shia LeBeouf playing literary agent Kaufmann.

Kaufman:  The best choice would be if you could get a time machine and kidnap Robert Downey, Jr. from about 20 years ago.  Because the adult Kaufman is a sarcastic smart ass spoiled rich boy.  But since we don’t have time machines I got thinking of Shia LaBeouf of “Transformers” fame just because he’s young and I don’t think he’d have to stretch to be a sarcastic smart ass spoiled rich boy.  He could pretty much play himself.

Jennifer Lawrence as Frankie. KATNISS!

Frankie:  You need a girl who’s got some dramatic acting chops.  I got thinking of Jennifer Lawrence who was in “Winter’s Bone” or maybe Saorise Ronan from “The Lovely Bones” although she might be too young.  Or maybe one of the Fannings.  I’m not familiar enough with Emma Watson from the Potter movies to know if she’d be a good fit.  Just not the girl from “Twilight!”

Abby:  You don’t list her but I got thinking of her anyway.  I think Ellen Page or Emma Stone would be good for her because she’s the sassy, cynical Lois Lane-type.

Alex Pettyfer is my vote for Frank Maguire.

Frank:  I have no idea.  The problem is that Frank is a complex character.  He’s a selfish, manipulative jerk a lot of the time, but he’s also tender and generous when he wants to be.  He’s also highly intelligent and often has an imperial bearing.  So you’d need more than someone who looks hawt.  Maybe someone else can figure out who could bring all of that to the table.

I'm intervening here and voting that Alex Pettyfer pictured at right plays Frank Maguire (Frankie's twin brother). Now I may re-read some of those sex scenes.

7) Why did you settle for the cover art that you did for this book?

Well the first cover was pretty much a generic template with a bit of Microsoft Office clipart.  Then for Xmas we got my mom a scanner thing and it came with Photoshop Elements and since my mom didn’t need it, I took it and put it on my computer.  Once I fiddled a little with that, I figured I could make a cover that looked slightly more professional.  If you look at a lot of literary books, or really any books, most of them don’t use art that’s drawn.  Most rely on photos, probably stock photos that are cheaper than paying someone to draw something.

I went to a stock photo site and looked for something with a sunset or sunrise because of the scenes where Frost and Frankie are sitting in her window and such.  I chose the one I did because I liked the desk and hat rack and so forth in it because the story is about Frost finding a home, so I think the picture conveys that meaning.

8) This book has obvious sequel potential. Are you thinking of writing one?

As a joke on my blog I wrote up an idea borrowed from “Spaceballs” called “Where You Belong 2:  The Search for More Money” that has Frost and company searching for buried treasure a la “National Treasure” or “The da Vinci Code.” 

In reality if there ever were a sequel, I don’t think it’d be for another 10-20 years or more.  Any sequel would have to cover what happens to Frost and company through middle age, into old age and I’m not at that point in my life where I could really write that.

9) I think that this book is a masterpiece. Did you even try to get an agent for it and were just unsuccessful? Why did you decide to self-pub?

I queried a couple-dozen agents and didn’t get much of a nibble.  To be honest I always figured that I’d have to self-pub because the book is very long and deals with controversial issues.  It’s not the kind of thing a mainstream publisher would be very interested in and smaller presses wouldn’t probably have the budget for it.  At the same time, I felt this one was too good to sit in a drawer or in a blog no one ever reads.  So self-pubbing was the way to go.

10) I think that Frost is a beautiful character and a gentle soul. Did it bother you to do so many horrible things to him? At times I was thinking...holy crap Patrick...ease up on Frost will ya? Let him have his happiness for Christ's sake.

I think Frost says it best when he says, “Were this a fairy tale I would have ended the story that night with "They Lived Happily Ever After." Certainly that's how I thought the story would end as I stroked Frankie's hair and listened to her soft breathing. 

But life is not a fairy tale.”

I don’t think anything really bothered me until I got to the very end.  I went through a number of different endings before settling on the one I did.  In one ending Frost goes back to Vegas after his father dies and scatters his ashes at the old casino where Jack used to hang out.  In another he goes back to help victims of the floods in Iowa and finds a new calling.  But I didn’t really like those.  Maybe because they didn’t really get back to the titular issue of him finding out where he belongs in love.  After everything that had happened I didn’t want it to be the kind of book that ends in some arbitrary place.  I wanted me and the reader to feel that this chapter of his life had come to an end without getting too dark or too happy.

Buy Patrick's Book at this link for .99 cents on kindle ebook or for $17.99 in paperback.