By Sorcha Murray
There are many distinct aspects of the book world that can influence a purchase. One’s own taste, the prices, and word of mouth are all top options. Another major influence of choosing a book is of course: it’s cover. But should we be judging a book by it’s cover? Is book cover designing a true art form that can give insight to perspective readers, or simply a shallow marketing tool?
Particularly, Ireland is rampant with successful book cover designers, such as Fidelma Slattery, Anna Morrison and Jack Smyth so this is a viable career path for anyone intrigued by the creative process behind book publishing.
I spoke to Irish book cover designer Niall McCormack on his process as a designer, the industry and how important we should consider book covers to be. McCormack, who has been recognised at the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ 50 Books 50 Covers Awards first shed some light for me on how the industry works “Very rarely are you in touch with the author. So, what happens usually is the publisher will be in touch with the author and the publisher will be in touch with the designer. But very rarely will the designer be in touch with the author”.
McCormack also informs me on just how much of the book the cover designer will actually get to read “You would think, you would imagine that book designers read the [entirety] of all the books they do. But sometimes you might get a chapter, you might get a synopsis, you might get three chapters, you might get the full book. Sometimes the publisher won’t want to release the material, or it won’t be ready, or it’ll only be, it’ll be in an unedited form, or they’ll be worried about that the draft would get out into the public domain. They don’t want to share it too much with people ahead of publication. So there are situations where sometimes… with non-fiction, you will tend to get a synopsis of what the book is about.”
Advocating for judging a book by it’s cover, there is one stark, recent example that stands out to me. Anyone who has read the new Sally Rooney novel will connect to designer Kashan Rajani’s use of Yves Klein Blue on the Intermezzo novel cover as it correlates directly to the melancholy themes within the book. Accompanied by a portrayal of the two central characters in the book, their positioning on the book cover indicative of their failing relationship explored within the book. In this case, a book cover design is proven to serve an authentic insight for a reader into a potential purchase.
Speaking specifically of the Intermezzo cover and female writers at large, McCormack tells me how this would not have been a reality in the book cover design industry when he started. McCormack tells me of the prominence of “Chick Lit” in the 90’s, a trend of book cover designing where works of fiction by female authors were seen to be without nuance depth or compelling storytelling. Thus, the design process consisted of “be[ing] a pink cover” simply deemed “Chick lit” and their covers in tow, not taken seriously.
This example of “Chick Lit”, a marketing tool attempting to attract the stereotype of female readers that would be attracted to these simple pink book cover designs is a clear indicator to not trust a book by its cover. McCormack tells me “They were downgrading books to this narrow idea”.
Here we see a design that can catch your eye should not be seen as a simple coincidence, there are people in offices scheming for your attention!
There are other elements at play, publishers resorting back to cheap marketing strategies of targeting stereotypes. However, these book publishers must have an effective working relationship with the designers for any work to get done.
These different personalities as McCormack tells me “Book designers tend to be more visually focused. Publishers tend to be more text-focused….And so the best scenario is if a publisher has a strong visual interest as well as their focus on the text, and a designer needs to have a balance of the two as well”.
However, McCormack tells me how there is a large pushback in the industry today against this type of strategy. Reflecting on the demographics dominating the industry today “The total opposite has happened…The Sally Rooney phenomenon has marked the end of that ghettoisation (exploiting a marginalised group) of women’s writing into being in pink covers, which embossed gold and all that terrible stuff.”
For example, McCormack singles out another modern female writer, Marian Keyes, whose book cover designs (by Gemma Correll) “Would have been firmly marketed in the chic lit style [if released in the 90’s]. If you look at her books now, they look much more like literary fiction. They’re still fun-looking and they’re still playful, but they’re not like dayglow pink. That’s been a really interesting and a positive move”. Instead, an emphasis on cover designing that is authentic to the material is what should be of paramount importance.
Unphased by an industry that can allow stereotypes and biases to creep in, McCormack has his own ethos for his work “Let a book cover be a good representation of actually what’s in the book rather than an imagined idea of the market that might read the book”.