Cover Fire

In the course of piecing this website together one of the jobs I’ve been busy with is creating collages of covers to illustrate the author pages, this has triggered a relapse of OCD, Outrage at Cover Design changes. Upon migrating from beautiful, space consuming paper to practical, minimal electric ink I barely see the covers of books anymore, apart from at the point of purchase (note to Amazon, please fix it so the cover of the last book opened can be the kindle screensaver) so I have not experienced a bout of OCD for some time (instead I seethe about inconsistent titling and the inability to view each author’s titles in chronological order). This all changed within about 10 minutes of googling the images required and finding that: a) ugly and uninspired film tie-in versions of books still exist, even more infuriating when an iconic cover has been discarded only to be replaced with something naff; b) publishing companies keep changing the covers of books even without film tie-ins.

I don’t think that anyone who likes books is a fan of a film tie-in cover, for me it somehow to cheapens the book, particularly if the film doesn’t live up to the book in question. Why would anyone buy a great book off the back of a crap film, they’d be better off using the book cover on the movie poster. Personally I struggle to understand why anyone would read the book after watching the film rather than the other way round, in most cases you’ve spoiled the ending, and the middle, and any twists and turns along the way. So why then sit down and spent 10 hours or so reading the book? For this reason I can understand watching a film after you’ve read the book, there’s a lower tariff on your time, but the other way round?? Also, who wants to limit their imagination by already having Elijah Wood in their head when they read LOTR. That’s not to say that there aren’t some very good translations out there, sometimes very tenuously linked to the books, in fact I actually prefer it when they don’t stick to the story, then I feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds (How to Train Your Dragon).

The second cause of OCD, changing the cover for no reason, is I have to say, much, much more infuriating than the first. If it’s a stand-alone novel with a terrible cover that was knocked up on the cheap before sales went through the roof, fine, but then that cheap cover doesn’t seem to be doing the book any harm, so why change it. If it’s a series of books that have all been published and you change the covers this agitates me greatly, if it’s a series of books and you change the covers part way through release and retrospectively change the covers of previous books this angers me profusely. In my view this should be a criminal offence, if I’ve bought the first three or four books of Dave the Wizard and I’m waiting expectantly for the next one, then when it comes out the cover and the spine change format, I’m fuming. Why would you do this? You’ve just annoyed a loyal reader, I’ll buy the next book sure, but I’ll be grumpy about it, I’ll feel that you’ve done it purely to try and make me repurchase the previous books.

I like the books on my shelves to look good, I like a series to stand out and look like they belong together, I get attached to the covers and cover art, if you change the covers you spoil all of these things. It’s not necessary either, Terry Pratchett’s books were fortunate to benefit from iconic covers from the start with Josh Kirby’s amusing illustrations. Until his death in 2001 the covers remained unchanged, at that point Paul Kidby took over and he continued until Pratchett passed away, there’s been a bit of fiddling with the covers, but by and large you can still buy the books with the original covers. By contrast, Robert Crais’ Cole and Pike novels, another series I’ve read over a large number of years, has seen multiple cover changes. In 2007 I made a concerted effort to purchase all the available books in the series with uniform covers, could I do it? No, it was impossible, they’d changed covers multiple times and not all the books had been re-released each time. I ended up with ten books that all matched and looked lovely with one odd one out that, chronologically at least belonged smack in the middle of the series, but artistically was a million miles away from the other books. My obsession with this is lamentable I know, but it’s just so damn annoying and completely unnecessary, so why, why, why do publishers insist on doing it? Like this post it needs to stop. Now.