The face that launched thousands of book sales? The first release in Monty Soutar's planned Kāwai trilogy has spent more than a year on the Top 10 fiction list. Photo / Michael Craig
If it’s a romance novel the main character must wear a hat. (We don’t make the book cover design rules - but we do report on them).
“I look fat,” said the famous New Zealander who had just written a book. “Can you do some tweaking?”
Weeks out from publication and the author hated the cover of their autobiography. “Sure,” said the publisher. (Unsaid: “We’d already done quite a bit of tweaking!”)
Behind every story is another story. We all judge books by their covers - but how does a book get that cover? Who chooses the images, text and titles? How many designs don’t make the cut? And when did the modern young woman get so sad and floppy?
“I’d love to be a fly-on-the-wall for deep cover discussions,” says Jenna Todd, bookseller at Auckland’s Time Out.
Todd recently co-authored a presentation to local publishers. It included the pragmatic reminder that book spines should match their covers.
“Your book is beautiful, but you haven’t written the title and author on the spine. Your book is probably going to spend most of its life spine-out.”
Booksellers are at the coalface of cover trends - from the so-called “floppy ladies” who collapse on couches and bang their heads against walls in a post-Sally Rooney world (see Sorrow and Bliss et al) to the “emoji effect” in which a single graphic element screams from plain backgrounds (a la 2023′s Yellowface).
Locally, there has been a recent shift to illustrated covers but Todd says landscape will always feature in fiction and non-fiction.
“A common theme in New Zealand writing is a strong sense of place; place is quite significant.”
Last year’s hottest cover colour? Orange, which was, perhaps, a brief respite from blue and a forerunner to pink (but probably not green because everybody knows green books don’t sell - more on that later).
“Floppy ladies was a big trend a few years ago, but it’s still making its mark,” says Todd. “Those books have the same keywords describing them. Ooh, here’s another ‘razor-sharp’ novel. Now they’ve started saying things like ‘diamond-sharp’ - they’re trying to think of more mediums that could be sharp!”
Another enduring trend: “If I say ‘red lady book’ a bookseller would know what I meant. She’s always looking out a window or there’s the Eiffel Tower in the background.”
Nobody knows exactly how many new books are published annually. One estimate puts the worldwide total at around four million. The most recently available local figure is from 2022 when about 2475 new titles hit our shelves - and screens.
Reading formats have changed, and so has cover design. The trend to bold, sans-serif titles is driven by the thumbnail-sized imagery of online shopfronts. Meanwhile, hardcopy books are becoming more elaborate - reflective surfaces, sprayed edges and collector’s editions.
“Hachette released a special Australia and New Zealand edition of the Rebecca Yarros fantasy book Iron Wing. It had sprayed edges, with a pattern on them, and we got so many international orders,” says Todd.
“People read across all formats. Publishers are becoming more inventive and making physical books more beautiful and less disposable.”
Nielsen BookScan data lists Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as last year’s local fiction bestseller. The book is set in the South Island, but its graphic black and white cover is straight out of the northern hemisphere, via the author’s United Kingdom publisher, Granta.
Te Herenga Waka University Press publisher Fergus Barrowman says the design was “so good” he decided against commissioning a New Zealand version. More practically, when the newest novel from a Booker Prize winner is guaranteed to be all over the book-reading internet: “There’s an incentive to have one badge for the book . . . the interesting thing is that the American cover is the same artwork, but it reverses the black and white.”
Can you judge a book by its cover? Not if you’re a publisher dealing in raw manuscripts.
“A cover is positioning,” says Barrowman. “It gives you a sense of the story and it also gives you tone and mood. I’m quite used to reading books without any of that. Sometimes I think I look for books where I don’t feel the heavy hand of the publisher on my shoulder.”
He might love the infamously minimal bright blue and off-white covers of Britain’s Fitzcarraldo Editions (“that’s the literary snob in me, liking that purity of intent and lack of persuasion”) but Barrowman is also responsible for one of last year’s most in-your-face local covers.
The international edition of Catherine Chidgey’s Pet features a floating ship pen. Contrast that with the fast car, flared pants and inflated bubble font on the scarlet background of the New Zealand edition. It’s a design born of Barrowman’s one-line brief: “SuperFly meets the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”
Distilling a manuscript into a catchphrase helps “imagine the book into being”, says Barrowman.
“It had to look like literary fiction and it had to also suggest crime and excitement. In my experience, covers either come really quickly or really slowly. There was a series of pencil sketches from the designer and then we fixed on one of them and got some colour added. It went through several stages, but the direction was chosen very early.”
In 1974, one of the world’s most famous book covers almost didn’t happen. The title had already been heavily debated. The author pitched The Stillness in the Water. Eventually, he settled on Jaws. Publication was imminent, but the cover image - a sleepy town viewed through the bleached jawbone of a shark - was problematic.
According to sales managers, it looked like a vagina with teeth. New artwork was ordered. Now, the book would feature a monster thrusting towards a female swimmer. As editor Thomas Congdon said in a major New York Times feature about the book: “We realised the new version looked like a penis with teeth. But was that bad?” Jaws went on to sell an estimated 20 million copies.
“Definitely the most hilarious, the most contested and the most emotional meetings in every publishing house I have ever worked in are the cover meetings,” says Claire Murdoch, Penguin Random House New Zealand’s head of publishing.
“On a lucky day, all the stars align. On an unfortunate day, it’s a bloodbath. I think it’s because it matters so much. Intrinsically, it has to be designed by a committee - but we all know that design by committee is a bad idea.
“What I often tell authors, at the very extreme cruel, cold end, is they need to think of their cover as a cereal box. Or, less hurtfully, I say a movie poster. It’s not helpful to think of it as a candy bar wrapper but it is, fundamentally. It can be a very artful poster or cereal box, but it has got a bunch of functional requirements - and it just needs to do that job.”
Murdoch says when she began working in publishing, “there was this widespread wisdom that you never ever, ever, ever have a green book cover. A green book cover would be suicidally foolish”. Recent green(ish) covers greenlit by Penguin Random House include Noelle McCarthy’s Grand and Kath Irvine’s Edible Backyard - “I can think of more books that it hasn’t hurt than books that it has!”
(On that Grand cover: “We tried 1000 different historical pictures of Noelle and her mum. Many of them were great, many of them were good - but none of them were that cover. And then, days before publication, her sister in Ireland found an old Polaroid, B-roll from some photoshoot she’d done in the 90s.”)
Sometimes, says Murdoch, “the magic just happens”. She points to Coco Solid’s How to Loiter in a Turf War. The illustration was “notionally meant to have been drawn by one of the characters, but obviously had been drawn by the author - the designer decided to colourise it and it was the perfect collaboration. It has gone on to appear to a huge number of people, but it was a complete accident.”
This story was originally pitched as an excuse to read books. I planned to go to the library and select five novels based solely on their covers. I would not read the blurb, I would attempt to ignore the title and author. I would go the beach, apply sunscreen and truly put the adage to the test: Can you judge a book by its cover?
The experiment was a total failure. Turns out publishers don’t want you to be surprised.
“If a reader buys a book because they think it’s a particular type of book, and then they get into it and it’s absolutely different, then you’ve cheated the reader,” says Michelle Hurley, publisher at Allen & Unwin New Zealand.
“There’s no way you should be able to confuse a crime novel with a romance novel. And if you can, I would hope it was a self-published book. We do have authors who try and design their own covers. I say ‘please don’t’. Sometimes they’re brilliant, but particularly for fiction, it’s hard. They’re so close to it, and maybe they’re a bit literal sometimes.”
It’s not just about getting the imagery right. Josie Shapiro’s Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts was originally called Mickey Bloom, after the main character in the debut novel that intertwines a coming-of-age story with an adult account of running the Auckland marathon.
“We were very happy with that name until we saw it on the page,” says Hurley. “When we came to the cover, it just didn’t work. It didn’t tell you anything about what kind of book it was.”
In the final design, typography does the heavy lifting. Stylised flowers loosely reference the protagonist’s name. “We all saw it and just went ‘love it’. Maybe, technically, that’s not exactly what you would have thought of for that book, but when you see it, you just know it. And that cover has really worked.”
Shapiro was the inaugural winner of Allen & Unwin’s new local fiction prize. Gavin Strawhan’s The Call (last year’s winner) will be released next month. Its cover features a stormy sky, a deserted beach and a Harley Davidson motorcycle. It will surprise absolutely nobody to discover this is a crime novel.
“At its most basic, a cover needs to get your attention,” says Hurley. “We’ll often print out a bunch of options and then put them face out on a bookcase . . . hopefully, if it’s a new book, it will be stacked on a display table in the store. How does it look? Does it jump out? Is that text recessive? Something can look beautiful on screen, and then we put it up on the shelf and it just disappears.”
In September 2022, Bateman Books released Monty Soutar’s Kāwai: For Such a Time As This. It’s described as an “epic historical adventure” set in pre-colonial Aotearoa. For 21 weeks, its tā moko’ed ed cover held the number one local fiction spot; 70-something weeks later, it has never been out of Nielsen BookScan’s Top 10 list.
Louise Russell, publisher at Bateman Books, said the author had a “very strong view” on the image he wanted on the cover.
“It is about eight generations of his own whakapapa, and so his own family is intrinsic to the story - he really wanted the subject to be someone from his family.”
Soutar’s nephew posed for the photoshoot and his daughter will feature on the front of the next instalment in the planned trilogy.
“We saw a few different options,” says Russell. “A couple of them were colourised in a different tone. It was just instantly clear to us that it should be this one.”
How crucial was the cover to the book’s success?
“I think it definitely played a part. It is such an eye-catching image and he is such a handsome person. But it isn’t the defining factor. I think that a book like this . . . it was eagerly awaited. It was the right time.”
The publishers opted for “spot UV” coating (a gloss laminate) on aspects of the cover, including the Māori warrior’s facial tattoos.
“We were a little worried, because sometimes if it’s too intricate, it doesn’t work. But it did work. Honestly? This was a very painless cover compared to some.”
(Russell recalls one author who wouldn’t back down over a design that nobody, including booksellers, liked. “So many people had such a strong, negative reaction. We had good fuel to go back and say we cannot proceed. If you want to sell your book, you need to change it.”).
The publisher gets the final say - but nobody wants to truly annoy their authors.
“The process can be quite different for each book,” says Keely O’Shannessy, the Wellington-based designer who gave Eleanor Catton’s debut The Rehearsal its script-like feel and argued hard for the jam sandwich imagery on Annaleese Jochem’s Baby.
“Annaleese had wanted a sort of historical painting. And when I read it, I thought that’s just so wrong for this book . . .”
Publishers don’t expect designers to read the book - “they’re visual people” said one - but O’Shannessy says she likes to get a sense of the work, “the way it’s written, the tone”.
She remembers, as a child, thinking that if she always carried a book with her, she would never be bored. She liked to flick to the covers as she was reading and reconsider their meanings.
“I like the idea that people will do that. That they will find more layers and they will understand why you’ve done what you’ve done on the cover. They won’t necessarily be thinking of the designer, but they’ll be thinking of the design.”
When O’Shannessy read Baby, she felt a lazy, sunburned heat. The main character lies on a boat; she eats jam sandwiches. One design option had a blue background and the sandwich was like an island. In another, there were flies around the sandwich.
“I think there’s a really big difference between your aesthetic taste and what’s actually kind of intriguing,” says O’Shannessy. “To be honest, when the cover is exactly right for the book, everybody knows. Always.”
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald as a senior lifestyle writer in 2016.
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