15 February 2007

Cover Time, take 2


Terribly sorry for the pathetic lack of blogging in February. I've been working on that book, which I mentioned a while back, and it's been hard to keep my head above water. I've drafted the penultimate chapter, and then I put together a paper on it, which I gave in London last week and will give here next week. It turned out this chapter had to be about Buffy and thus the massive Buffy literature meant a lot of work for me. Worse still, I made the fateful decision to finally go multimedia, so I've spent dozens of hours deep in the bowels of Keynote, doing everything in my power not to turn into the evil Powerpoint drones that I have cursed so over the years.

Anyway, those are all excuses. This post is about what I hope will be success in sorting out my book cover. Another round of thanks for all the great ideas and feedback from readers last time round. Turns out it's much harder to do a 'concept cover', as my editor called it (perhaps somewhat disdainfully), than we had all thought/presumed. So I wasn't able to use most of the fantastic ideas, since the 'system' is really just to send them a cover and let them go with it.

But I think I've found a cover. What do you think?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

looks copyrighted, but otherwise cool. can you photoshop a tv remote onto the table?

fronesis said...

Oh, I'm sure the artist's estate will want some money before I can use an image of his painting on my book. As for the remote control: don't know if that increases or decreases the fees.

Ruth said...

I love the picture -- but I am worried about the lack of references to television in it. The photoshopped remote might be a nice touch -- although if I were the artist (who was the artist? am I ignorant for not knowing?) I'd shudder at the request...

fronesis said...

Artist is Paul Cadmus; Painting is entitled 'Manikins'. I'd never heard of him, or it.

I, too, was slightly worried about TV's absence, but it has a lot of text and one of my arguments in the book is that we can read tv as text. Plus, maybe it's a bit queer not to have a TV on the cover of the book about TV.

Or...maybe it's just daft to have a cover on a book about TV with no references to TV. I don't know.

fronesis said...

I hear you sage one, but the problem is that 'fun with fonts' is the domain of the graphic designer, not the author. So it's very difficult for me to do anything more than pick an image.

Got a better image to recommend?