Sorry I couldn’t talk about it when your post first went up, but I had to wait for the official press release.

” I wrote . . . [the American publisher] expressing (with moderation) my dislike of the cover for [the first paperback of] The Hobbit. It was a short hasty note by hand, without a copy, but it was to this effect: I think the cover ugly; but I recognize that the main object of a paperback cover is to attract purchasers, and I suppose that you are better judges of what is attractive in USA than I am. I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste —(meaning though I did not say so: horrible colours and foul lettering)—but I must ask this about the vignette: what has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion and emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with the pink bulbs? . . .”

• * *

“[A representative of the publishers] rang me up. I had a longish conversation; but she seemed to me impermeable. I should judge that all she wanted was that I should recant, be a good boy and react favorably. When I made the above points again, her voice rose several tones and she cried: “But the man hadn’t TIME to read the book.” . . . With regard to the pink bulbs she said as if to one of complete obtusity: “they are meant to suggest a Chistmas Tree.” Why is such a woman let loose? I begin to feel that I am shut up in a madhouse.”

He was talking about the second one here.

Psst, plug the sequel.

thanks, Henry

hello unfoggers, Cheryl, all

I confess to having complained about the cover, but only because it highlighted a white-skinned minor character, the main viewpoint character being dark-skinned.

Henry:

I’m interested to know what it would take for a blogger to be someone that you “really trust”. There is a huge amount of book-blogging that goes on these days, and one of the reasons I don’t write proper reviews any more is that no one seems to trust anything that anyone says, unless they actually know the blogger, or are a fan of the blogger.

And as noted above in re: Sarah Monette, I have no problem whatsoever in picking up a book with an embarrassing cover as long as I have some sort of credible signal that the contents are good. Lizardbreath, if I understand her right, is in a different situation – where you have a social acquaintance with someone whose work you suspect you may not like, you may reasonably want to avoid entering into conversation with that person about that work. And here, given the awkwardness that can result if you do read it and hate it, it may be that even a weak negative signal is sufficient to turn you off, in the absence of any positive one.

Unfortunately, the fact that we’ve managed to successfully target our packaging in some respects has created the expectation in many readers, particularly more sophisticated readers, that SF and fantasy cover packages are overall reliable. Thus LizardBreath’s comment above, about walking away from a book that LB might have otherwise checked out because “it looked exactly like standardized post-Tolkien ripoff.”

The remarkably thing is that for much of the history of modern SF and fantasy, this sort of thing rarely happened, because clued-in readers simply assumed that all the covers were misleading tosh. The basic project around which modern SF fandom organized itself was readers informing one another which of the publications-that-looked-like-crap were in fact crap, and which ones were actually worth reading. There were good cover artists and well-designed books and magazines, but you couldn’t count on them correlating with worthwhile fiction. Everybody knew that. Nowadays, the discourse surrounding the question of which SF and fantasy intelligent people should read seems to be half arguments and complaints about the goddamn covers.

I don’t mind discussing the goddamn covers, and I’m generally delighted when we actually do manage to expand the vocubulary by which publishers can send accurate signals to more precisely-understood subsets of the world of readers, but for cripes’ sake, modern readers sometimes have unrealistic expectations of being spoon-fed perfect signals. There’s a reason “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is copybook wisdom. If you only ever try books whose cover packages perfectly cater to your personal aesthetic, you may have a satisfactory life, but you will certainly miss a metric ton of genre fiction you would have otherwise enjoyed.