Book Covers: How the Sausage Gets Made & my New Cover!

Karen Odden – every other Thursday 

People who don’t know me well ask me if I design my own covers. This makes me laugh and laugh. For I have no visual talent at all. I can barely draw polka dots. 

Readers also ask whether I have input, and who decided what goes on them. These are great questions, and having worked with several different editors and publishers, each one does it differently. Here are some of the stories behind the covers -- just for fun. 

Before my first book was published, a mystery writer friend of mine told me that it was pretty unusual for an editor to take the author's wishes into account when it came to covers. "I was shown my book cover and pretty much told I could have two responses," she said. "I could say, 'Oh, it's great!' or 'Oh, it's fabulous!'" 

Fortunately, that hasn't been my experience. All of my editors were willing to take my wishes into account, and for that I'm ever so grateful. 

Fast forward to when I saw the first version of the cover for A Lady in the Smoke (on the left). I winced because my mystery was set in 1878, and this kind of railway train, with a long corridor along the side, wasn't around in England until around 1910. And the young woman? No Victorian woman would wear a lacy dress like that out of her house. It looked more like a nightgown than proper Victorian garb. 

But it was my first book, and I didn't know what to do! Although I liked the overall vibe, my persnickety historical soul couldn't say "great" or "fabulous." So I contacted my agent in a minor panic. He passed along my concerns to my editor, who was fabulously open to suggestions. Her design team came up with version 2.0 (on the right), which featured an 1870s train and a dress much closer to true Victorian. Some anachronistic rhinestones on the dress in the original clip art were airbrushed out, the train was reversed from left to right to fit the space, and the backwards numbers on the front of the train erased.

Then came A Dangerous Duet. This cover was also developed in stages, with the London scene's reflection mirrored on the piano top one of the final pieces. But what I found interesting was what happened when the book was translated into Italian. A dark-ish mystery set in the London Victorian music halls, with young boys being forced to thieve for their livelihood, the book was recast as a romance (the words on the bottom are Un duetto pericoloso: I Grandi Romanzi Storici Special) for the Italian market.

A Trace of Deceit is about a young woman artist at the Slade School in the 1870s; her brother Edwin is a convicted forger who has just been released from prison. This cover originally had a monochromatic brick red painting in the upper right hand corner. I asked if we could switch it out for the painting that is stolen from Edwin's rooms--the painting of Madame du Pompadour by François Boucher--which, because it was in the public domain, they were happy to do, so this became the painting in the upper right corner.

The cover of Down a Dark River was originally developed with a young woman who looked rather like Barbie to me. 

However, the main character is Scotland Yard detective-inspector Michael Corravan--a former thief and bare-knuckles boxer from the seedy area of Whitechapel. After some discussion, the publisher changed it, so both it and the sequel Under a Veiled Moon conformed to genre expectations, with a dark-figured man in the foreground and a London scene behind. 

Now, just for fun, let's look at the Russian versions (paperback and hardcover) of these books. Such a difference, right? Particularly in the paperbacks. The one on the top left, the Russian paperback of Down a Dark River, is a set of women's hands with blood running down them; the hardcover conformed more to the English language version. Similarly, the paperback of Under a Veiled Moon, about a steamship disaster, had a very different paperback cover (no ship, no inspector); the hardback was more like the English language version.

I remember I was asked to "look over these covers," which puzzled me no small amount. I don't speak Russian, aside from "nyet," which appears occasionally in the NYT Sunday crossword. So the back cover copy could have been virtually anything. Without Google Translate, it might be a recipe for scones for all I knew. 

Finally, here is my cover for the book coming in June. 

It's been reimagined, revised, tweaked—and I utterly love it. To my eye, it’s evocative, historical, heist-y, feminine, luminous. The jewelry is Victorian; the sleeves are Victorian; the hands even look like they’ll be clever and deft. Good thieving hands...  

(To preorder the book or ebook for June 2 delivery, click here: https://bit.ly/3Mp22Ll)

Readers -- what tends to draw you to a cover? 

And for the writers out there – do you have any fun cover development stories?