The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Tom Tivnan is the features editor of The Bookseller. He will be blogging about the magazine's in depth coverage.

Hostage to fortune

12.09.08

UK book jacket designers’ creativity is being held hostage by in-house sales and marketing teams and increasingly powerful retail buyers. That, at least, is the opinion of a number of designers we talked to for this week’s feature, who see their work being increasingly dictated by the marketplace and bean counters. Innovation, they say, has migrated to America, where US publishers’ art policies are not as risk adverse as their UK counterparts.

We have collected an admittedly small random sampling of British and American covers and, broadly, I do think the designers have point. UK covers are more commercial, more supermarket and three for two-friendly. We can see this most acutely on the covers of Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs.

Vintage’s US version has a sombre, moody, almost monochrome photo of a bridge and water – it practically screams ‘prestige book’ – perhaps the right tone for a former Pulitzer Prize winner.

The UK cover (also published by Vintage) has a close up of two boys playing and, bar the smile on the face of one of the boys, evokes a misery memoir cover.

If it is true that UK covers are driven by sales teams, is that such a bad thing? Publishers and booksellers are in the business of shifting copies, not winning design awards. Perhaps publishers are perfectly right in listening to marketers and not art school graduates.

And does a jacket being less commercial necessarily mean it is more aesthetically pleasing? I’m not so sure. Canongate’s cover for Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is simple, stark and beautiful - yet is still obviously commercial. And it is miles better than its absolutely atrocious US counterpart from Farrar Straus and Giroux.