![the summer i turned pretty book cover the summer i turned pretty book cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71eQEL2sY0L.jpg)
It seems as if sixty-five per cent of all novels’ jackets feature an item of female apparel and/or part of the female anatomy and the name of some foodstuff in the title-the book-cover equivalent of the generic tough-guy-with-gun movie poster with title like “ 2 HARD & 2 FAST.” There’s clearly some brutally efficient Darwinian process at work here, because certain images-half-faces, napes, piers stretching into the water-spread like successful evolutionary adaptations and quickly become ubiquitous. Which is why the covers of most contemporary books all look disturbingly the same, as if inbred. Your product must be bold and eye-catching and conspicuously different from everyone else’s, but The main principles of design-in books, appliances, cars, clothing, everything-are: Perhaps to get rid of me for a while, my editor dispatched me on a research mission: to go to a bookstore, survey the covers of other literary nonfiction books, and report back to her about which ones I liked, and why. I also had a paranoid sense of shadowy, Olympian forces weighing in from farther above I’ve been told that the most powerful figures in the current literary world, the buyers for the major national bookstore chains, have been known to offer to increase their orders for a book if its cover is changed. Book covers are an important sales tool, and the marketing department felt, quite reasonably, that the cover was very much their business. For months we went back and forth: I’d send them several illustration options and they’d pick whichever one I liked least they’d send me some design options, I’d pick the one that made me least unhappy, and they’d veto it.
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I had what we’ll call a constructive dialogue with my publisher’s editorial, design, and marketing teams, finding a balance between my personal vision and something people might possibly want to buy. But, because I’m a cartoonist as well as an essayist, and also have a savvy and implacable agent whose will is not to be opposed, I had “approval” over the cover of my book, which meant that I got to make a tiresome and nit-picky pest of myself. Most writers are given what’s called “consultation” on their covers, which means that when they’re shown their cover designs they try not to cry right in front of their editors.
#THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY BOOK COVER PROFESSIONAL#
There’s often an embarrassing disconnect between how people try to present themselves and how they’re actually perceived, which is why they ask their friends to tell them honestly how they look in something-and why publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them. What kind of face would best express your inner self? Maybe more important, what kind of face will make other people like or respect or want to sleep with you? Do these two hypothetical faces bear any resemblance to each other? Can you imagine a face that would combine their best features? It’s a little like getting to choose your own face. Getting to design your own book cover is the sort of ultimately maddening power that probably shouldn’t be entrusted to vain mortals.