Book Covers and the Lotus Lyceum

My favorite new-to-me blog is the Lotus Lyceum. It's comments have some of the liveliest and most interesting discussions I've seen in a long time.

I've been nattering on and on in a recent post about book covers. To quote myself:

But to many publishers the book is JUST a product. And to Waterstone’s, the book is JUST a product. They want to sell books. They stay in business (and pay their mortgages and put food on the table and buy a pint and put clothes on their book) but selling products, which in their case happen to be books. Now, for you personally, this is not how you view books. It’s also probably not as black-and-white as I paint it even for the booksellers’ view of books.

It’s almost as if you need to have two brains to work with books. The one brain loves the story, gets caught up in the characters, want to hold the book to your chest and weep with its brilliance. The other brain wants people to buy it so it needs to look pretty, not have any errors in it, get nice blurbs, nice reviews, etc. The first brain is what you use to create it. The second brain is what you use to send it out into the world (because that first brain wouldn’t let the book’s hand go if it had its way). And the first brain soaks up the accolades of the book after it’s out and people love it.

There's a lot of good stuff on this blog, said by more witty people than me.

Tags: Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, book covers