HOWZAT

Covers fall into colour-coded types: white is for self-help and the recent spate of “misery” memoirs, pastels are for chick lit, black is for crime and horror, and for reasons no one is quite sure about, art directors avoid green. As soon as a book is successful, a Harry Potter, say, or a Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, then its cover art spawns endless imitations.

This presents publishers with a dilemma, says Scott Pack, the head buyer for Waterstone’s: do you do something different to stand out, or will that risk confusing your target audience by bucking the trend? “At one end of the extreme a lot of crime books look like The Da Vinci Code, but if you like The Da Vinci Code, then it forms a signpost, it is helpful,” Peck says.

But he then cites the case of Andrea Camilleri, an Italian crime writer who wrote “intelligent, eloquent” fiction, but was stuck in the clichéd dark, moody crime cover. A far-sighted publisher commissioned a new cover from Jeff Fisher, who designed Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

“It’s very colourful, very quirky, and in the crime section it looks completely different from anyone else; sales have improved dramatically. But it is incredibly difficult to get right.”

Patrick Janson-Smith, the literary agent and former publishing director of Transworld, would exhort his art department to “lead not follow”, only sometimes to be faced with the response “you told us you wanted it to look like a bestseller”.

He believes that covers have the power to do more harm than good: “I can’t think of a jacket that has transformed the fortunes of a book, but I have seen books absolutely die on the back of a jacket.” To keep everyone focused on this point he often encouraged his staff to take the proposed cover out of the boardroom and look at it sneaked on to the shelf in a nearby bookshop, or at least in a crowded shelf in the office.

“It completely changed things, you can judge its visibility,” he says.

“Publishers don’t know a good cover until they see it . . . I don’t know if they know anything much.”

Hot . . . or not?

We asked the book world for covers that worked . . . and some that didn't

PATRICK JANSON-SMITH
Literary agent and former publishing director of Transworld

Could do better: Margrave of the Marshes, by John Peel and Sheila Ravenscroft.

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