Good Morning, John. They say that you can't judge a book by it's cover but
I say you can't not judge a book by its cover.
That's what the cover is for! There's a reason that this book, and this book, and this book all look kind of identical.
Like take a real fast look -
Fantasy novels, right?
You can tell 'cause there's like chiseled words over high contrast illustrations and all the fonts have serifs.
Oh my gosh look at baby Neil Gaiman! He's so cu-
Boom!
That looked different but very similar, but it's sans serif font so it's sci-fi.
That's the difference!
So for obvious reasons I've been thinking a lot about book covers lately.
And I want to share with you today the cover of my book,
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, it's available September 25th and you can get it for pre-order now.
But first I'd like to give, like, a deeply subjective and incomplete list of some of the best book covers from the last 10 or 15 years.
Let's start here, with a book that came out in 1986, but I promise it's going to make sense in a second.
This is Watchmen.
If you've read the comic, you know what this image is, if you haven't then you probably don't, and I like that a lot about it.
It's mysterious, but it's bold and eye-catching
So bright!
And I like the bold, very sort of logo design alternate title placement.
I mean obviously iconic, one of the most iconic covers ever,
but it's not really one of the things on my list.
This Is! This is It Devours by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor,
and when I first saw it I thought of the cover of Watchmen. Obviously the color, but also the really sort of
bold comic-y font. I love this image. I love that there's a lot of like radial, interesting things
happening in covers right now.
Here's another really good interesting, radially-designed thing. And I also like that, in this case, the title kind of becomes the cover rather than
there having to be some external design element.
Now maybe this is going to be a little bit surprising.
I don't generally tend to like photographic covers but the pale, white arms and this bright
red centerpiece of this like lovely pure thing that you really,
is the kind of thing that you'd like to take a bite out of.
The color scheme here, um, obviously was imitated a lot.
And I also really like the tinyness of the title, like the insignificance of the title and the author name.
That's a bold choice and, and, like, maybe you didn't expect to see "Twilight" today but there it is.
Let's go more recent: "Simon vs. the Homosapiens Agenda". I like this book cover so much.
Again, bold color choices, something I'm a huge fan of.
There was a trend for a long time in young adult fiction to chop people's heads off
and I think the idea was like, give people looking at the cover something to relate to, but not too much.
This does that in a really interesting way and also it is reminiscent of, or evolves on,
a similar sort of cloud-based handwritten font thing.
Which leads me to, one of the be—, like I might be a little bit biased here, but one of the best covers from the last ten years.
This was such a departure.
When Rodrigo Corral made this for "The Fault in Our Stars" I feel like it really leveled-up young adult literature.
It feels kind of almost branded.
And I think that it started off, or was part of a really important and necessary trend in cover design.
My second-to-last cover: V. E. Schwab's "A Darker Shade of Magic".
Again, really interesting, thoughtful color choice happening here.
This cover to me feels, kind of, full of institutional knowledge,
like it knows a great deal about the book that I don't know yet.
I like that about it.
And finally, the last thing on my list...
Bam ba da ba ba ba ba ba ba ba!
...is the cover of my book!
I realize that I'm biased but that's ok. I think I have the cutest cat in the world too.
And it's not like I designed it. I had minimal input.
It was a very scary process, and I'm so happy that I'm happy with what happened.
To me this font feels very, like, pulp. It feels adventure, it feels comic.
But then in the background here it feels like you're getting drawn into something
that's a little bit mysterious, a little bit creepy, which is exactly what I wanted.
Like it feels a little bit ostentatious in its color choice which, if you know the main character of the book,
which none of you do yet, that makes a lot of sense.
April is a graphic designer herself, the main character in the book, and she's very into color choice.
But I think that she'd be into how it kind of stands on its own as a design
and a little bit of, you know, an identity for the book.
All of the English language publishers really like this so it's gonna be the same cover in the U.K., in Canada, in Australia.
My book has a cover!
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.