That said: Obviously sticking this sort of generic cover on a fantasy novel sells well within the built-in fantasy audience, just as a photo of a snow-swept landscape and elegant sans-serif text works for a certain type of literary novel. But in a publishing paradigm where every other headline screams about falling sales, it appears to be somewhat short sighted. The audience for these books is not a constant.

Moreover, ‘crossover’ books, by which I mean the ones that attract new readers to the genre (and so in economic terms, among your most valuable customers), are rarely so generic. If anything, they borrow from the design tropes of more mainstream books, because as an earlier commenter mentions, oftentimes the descendants of Frazetta are just plain embarrassing and you don’t want to be seen with them.

I think, also, it hurts authors more than anything else. When they become really successful, fantasy and SF books tend to get cover redesigns. Out goes Conan, caped or not, in comes something suggestive and vaguely symbolic. Blurbs from Publishers Weekly are replaced by acclaimed authors like Junot Diaz, crossovers like George RR Martin and if you’re Neil Gaiman, Norman Mailer. Basically, these authors get out of Dodge fairly quicksmart.

Given the huge competition for not a whole load of readers, it seems to me that being the author of a fantasy book which looks almost identical to 80% of the other novels in the Fantasy/SF section is not going to do me any favours. I would suggest, respectfully, that Rothfuss (for example) made such a splash as a result of reviews and word of mouth, not because he had variously a shirtless redhead or a cloaked Figure of Mystery on the cover.

(Speaking as a redhead, I can vouch for the fact that shirtlessness is not always desired).

Okay, that was a bit of a ramble. Look, Mark Charan Newton’s book may be terrific – I don’t know, he’s new to me. He’ll probably get a certain amount of initial play because his book looks like it belongs in the Fantasy section of the bookshop. That’s brilliant and more power to him. But in a world filled with competition for every book buyer, where reviews, word of mouth and crossover hype is the difference between doing this for a living and writing the odd book here and there alongside a 9-5, I would rather my work be presented in as original and eye-catching a way as I would hope to have written it (if that makes any sense). He might get lucky and succeed despite that – it may be that the power of word of mouth propels him into real sales – but it’s an awful chance to take.

Of course the cover isn’t everything, but it is important. You decide as much what you don’t want to read as what you do, based on it. This is not to say that heroic covers are a bad idea, but that many of them are tired, unimaginative and not visually gripping. Finally, the audience who buys books with cloaked figures do so because back in the dim past, people like Aidan said “This book, the one that happens to have a cloaked figure, is good. Buy it.” Ultimately, that’s where the power lies.

Reviews, what are they good for?’

Please check it out.

Mark- I suspect you might not be able to answer this question publicly here but I wonder which cover you prefer, HB or PB regardless of what your publisher thinks will sell. I think if everyone just fessed up and said, “look, this new cover art isn’t as good or as interesting but it will sell more books and that’s the goal”, I would totally respect that and I think this whole debate goes away. Mark, you hinted at that as much and I say yeah, you gotta do whatever you can to move more copies.

I’m a former bookstore general manager and while I might read 3-4 fantasy novels a year, I by no means consider myself a huge genre reader. Maybe that’s why I found the HB cover much more visually interesting (reminded me a bit of Gormenghast) and as such, made me feel like the contents would be a cut above the usual genre tropes. Which they were- thanks Mark. Definitely looking forward to the next novel.

A personal favourite set of covers were those created by Jim Burns for the first three volumes of the Voyager editions of George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series. But what a disappointment it was to see the cover for the fourth volume – a ‘Chalice from the Palace’ or was it the Holy Grail?

At the Glasgow Worldcon, I had the opportunity to tackle Jane Johnson of Harper Collins on this very subject and she told me that it was simply a matter of cost. Perhaps I am missing something here, but surely a best-selling author deserves to have his/her work wrapped in an artwork of a comparable quality?

Another example that springs to mind is the aforementioned Naomi Novik (also signed to Harper Collins in the UK). Again, the first three covers were quality works from the hand of the excellent Dominic Harman, but the subsequent covers were, IMHO, totally inferior. Another cost issue, I suspect.

So following on from Aidan’s point about the possibility of the author not liking the cover, does the author have any real choice if the publisher wants to save money on the cover art?

Perhaps I should intervene…

Julie’s been great with this – I was asked at the very start about this new, character-centric direction, and was in agreement – I want to sell books, after all. We agreed on who was the best character to have on the cover too (Brynd is very much central to book two, so he stars on that one). I was shown the drafts, the poses of the character, and asked for my thoughts all the way through…

But I know I’m one of the lucky ones!

Short answer? Everyone. I read it, the designer reads it and any freelance illustrator we commission reads it.

I have no objection if people don’t like a cover. I don’t like some covers. It’s individual taste – it’s what keeps things interesting. I do find it a little frustrating though when it’s insinuated that editors and publishers just plonk a cover on the front of a book without much thought entering into the process. It’s a little like accusing a reviewer of not having read a book they’ve reviewed.

We’re passionate about books. It’s why we got into the job in the first place. The books we buy are books we’ve fallen in love with. We spend months of our lives working on them, thinking about them, obsessing about whether the wording on the cover copy is correct, if the cover is appropriate, if a particular phrase could be used better. Yes – we are that pedantic! And that’s just the cover, don’t get me started on the editing!

The cover meetings are attended by sales, editorial, marketing, art and publicity and everyone has a view. The final version you see will probably be the end result of five or six different roughs before then. Then we have to show it to the author – always a nervous stage! If they like it, we’re happy.

Then it comes to you guys… So – as readers you either like the cover or you hate it. Nothing at all we can do about that. But please be assured – there’s a LOT of work done on books and covers in general. This isn’t just a job to us.

I’ve been fascinated to watch this debate grow on the blogs over the last year or so because it’s so far outside of my realm of interest.

On the marketers in publishing companies, it’s great that the marketers at SFF publishers are there because they love the industry and the books. The marketers in a lot of the rest of the publishing industry seem to be there because they are too rubbish to get a job anywhere else.

@Aiden You must hope that what you say has some sort of influence otherwise you wouldn’t be here But no I don’t expect to be the voice of marketing but if I can get someone to read a book or an author to love then I’m over the bloody moon. And I definitely enjoy being part of a group of people that loves talking about and discovering new books and rediscovering old classics and uncovering older stuff then the more the merrier.

@Neil – Arachn got exactly what I meant! I want people to read the books I love and not to buy the books I hate. I’m always up for being challenged but it’s rare that readers challenge bloggers and that sense of feedback needs to be nurtured more.

Should bloggers engage with publishers? Should they find interesting things to blog about? Should they share what they are excited by and passionate about? Of course they should. Does it give us a conflict of interest? Only if you we, as a whole, go from being honest to being a tool. We don’t get paid, we don’t do it on the whole for free books, and we do it for free! There is little point in doing this if we don’t enjoy it.

Are we critics? Yes! Are we passionate? Yes! Are we honest? Hopefully yes! Are we afraid of saying what we think? No, what would be the point in doing it? Really? No one is going to engage with us if we were and it’s those people that comment on your blog and talk to you about the books you’ve read that you blog for not the silent masses on the whole.

Back to covers. You know what I think UK publishers have a short hand that pushes certain buttons in my head. There are so many other factors that go into me wanting a book but the cover is going to taint my expectations of the contents. I want them to be similar to others like them. I don’t want them to be horrible but I don’t want them to stand out so much that I think they are going to be hard work or hard to understand unless they genuinely need to be.

The Night’s cover might be a miss-note as it’s about more than one man but a person is more engaging than a building. And it’s similar to lots of covers on the shelf so I know roughly were it fits in.

You’ve probably all made much more sense than me though. Been fascinating to read. Thanks.

Arachn – Obviously I love to find out that a book I loved sold a few more copies because of my reviews. But that’s not the reason I write reviews. I write them to collect and archive my thoughts, to inform my readers and help them make a decision, not act as an extension of the marketing department of whichever publisher put the novel out.

Graeme – Yeah. I certainly have. It’s not always a subconcious thing. But sharp cover art can often determine whether I pick a novel up off a bookshelf or read a blog post about it. From there, it’s up to a whole lot of other factors to determine whether I end up reading it or not.

Simon – Complicated and nuanced, indeed.

Thanks for the input, Simon. I agree that getting into a battle of tastes is a rather slippery slope. Still, as an independant blogger, I have my tastes and the tastes of my readers to judge what the industry is doing. Taste is everything. You’re not going to publish a novel with a cover that you think is poor, no matter what market trends say. I’d assume that everybody involved in the cover design process makes choices based on personal taste every day. If you (or anyone) is ever able to provide me, either privately or publically, with some of this data that support the trends, I’d love to see it. As it is, the way I see it is that if a majority of the novels on shelves have a guy-with-a-sword-and-a-cloak, then of course the novels that sell well have a high chance of having a guy-with-a-sword-and-a-cloak.

In the end, I suppose it’s an issue that people on either side of the fence will simply have to agree to disagree upon. We all use metrics too dissimilar to really find an even ground, most of the time.