I'm feeling very benign towards the USA today, for reasons you can probably imagine. And among other things, I've been reflecting on how having a separate deal with an American publisher makes you realise how differently they present your work. (It also improves cashflow, but that's another blog post.) My two editors read my work itself in very similar ways, but how that expresses itself, for that market, in the whole package (yes, horrid word, but necessary) does vary. As you can see on the sidebar, the covers for The Mathematics of Love were very different, as were the blurbs, and it was interesting to see which of the translations followed which path, and which did their own thing. The blurbs for A Secret Alchemy are great and actually rather similar - it's not the easiest book to sum up in a few compelling sentences - but the covers are very different. You can see Headline Review's cover in the sidebar, but this is the Harper Perennial cover:
It's due to be published next summer, and what you can't see online is that those delicious little views of the Tower of London are actually seen through cut-outs in the cover: when you open it, it has an inner cover with the whole engraving (see below) across the double spread. In other words, it physically reflects the sense in the book that the past and the present are just two different layers in the same world.
I know a few writers who say, 'Covers are a marketing decision and I'm happy to leave it up to my publisher,' but they're a pretty rare breed. The rest of us care passionately about our covers, while not always being equipped to judge them best. The cover is, indeed, the first thing a potential buyer sees, and it must send a clear message about what kind of book it is and who will like it. Trouble starts for two reasons: the message just isn't one the author likes (though it may or may not be faithful to the book) or the simplicity of the message is frustrating, because, after all, if you could have said everything that's important about the book in one small picture, we wouldn't have needed to write all those thousands of words. In that message the physical qualities of the cover are important: Headline's jacket for A Secret Alchemy is made of lovely, rough, matte handmade-feeling paper which goes beautifully with that image. But, except for childrens and novelty books, I'd never thought that a cover could express in three dimensions how my stories exist in the fourth dimension - time - as well as space. But those clever folk at HarperCollins have done just that, and I'm thrilled to bits.
