thoughtfulRecently, I got a look at the cover for an upcoming book in an urban fantasy/paranormal romance series That Shall Not Be Named, because I try to be polite like that. For purposes of discussion, we're going to call it An Armchair to Remember, book three in the Ikeamancer series. Our main character, Casey Carpenter, has inherited the family gift for communicating with furniture. Naturally, she uses this power to fight crime, since she doesn't really have anything else to do with her time.
On the cover of the first book, Cushioning the Blow, Casey was pictured as described in the text: reasonably pretty but not going to be anybody's new super-model, with dark hair that needs styling, a wardrobe that looks like it could handle her daily duties as a general manager at Ikea, and a few iconic items in the background. On the cover of the second book, From Desk 'Til Dawn, she was drawn slightly differently, but still believably the same character. Same basic styling, attitude, etc.
On the cover of An Armchair to Remember, she looks like a seventeen-year-old Goth hooker. Please join me in saying, um, what the hell?
Now, I understand that characters will look slightly different from cover to cover. Toby looks a little bit different on the covers of Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night...but these differences are, at least from my perspective, still allowably within the range of "this character is Toby." It's the variance between a picture of Alice drawn by Mimi and a picture of Alice drawn by Bill—they look different, but she's still clearly Alice Price-Healy, getting ready to kick your ass. You can draw the same character within a range and still have it believably stand for the same individual.
The cover for An Armchair to Remember isn't doing that. In fact, if I didn't know the book (the theoretical book), I'd guess that we were looking at the first in a spin-off series starring Casey's ironically trampy-campy younger sister, Carrie, who communicates with clothing and manages a Hot Topic in the mall. It doesn't look a thing like Casey. Casey wouldn't be caught dead in that outfit. It is, essentially, the equivalent of sticking Toby in a mini-skirt and push-up bra for the cover of Late Eclipses, after giving her a bleach job and some serious makeup.
How jarring is this for you? How likely are you to pick up An Armchair to Remember when it looks so different from the other books in the series—when the main character looks so different? Is this going to make you look elsewhere, or do you not care by the time you get to the third book in a series? What about new readers? If this was the first volume you'd seen, would you buy book one after digging it out of the back catalog? Inquiring minds (namely, me) want to know.
November 10 2009, 23:16:38 UTC 7 years ago
For my money, though, the number one offender is Daryl K. Sweet, whose covers for Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series are often so badly rendered that it takes considerable forensic analysis to determine which major character he was attempting to portray.
But I digress. Changing artists in mid-series can be an especially distressing shift. Sometimes it works well- Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series has been well served by the same cover artist who's making yours- but it can be just awful, especially if the artist has not apparently made any effort to be faithful to the text. If I'm halfway into a series, I'm unlikely to drop it because of a jarring cover, but it may well make me growl, and it will certainly affect the perceptions of the sort of reader who will pick up a book in mid-series. I won't let a bad cover override a good recommendation, but I realize I may well be in the minority, and I can and have picked up new series partway in on the basis of a good cover (and conversely have been disappointed on a few occasions when I discovered that the promise of the cover wasn't delivered by the text, perhaps unfairly turning me against otherwise commendable series).
On an entirely unrelated note- I would totally read the series you're currently hypothetically discussing, bad third cover and all. A few months ago, some friends and I ran a home-brewed LARP in which everyone was a B-list superhero. I think my favorite character there was Credenza, whose power was talking to furniture. My character, Copycat, had no powers of his own but claimed to the other characters that he could mimic the powers of anyone around him; when Credenza was knocked out with no one in the room, he was called upon to interview the antique desk she was slumped over to find out what happened to her. He dodged the issue by claiming it only spoke French, and therefore he was unable to understand it.
November 11 2009, 03:14:03 UTC 7 years ago
November 11 2009, 04:29:16 UTC 7 years ago