You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge the cover, and writers do it all the time. Cover art is one of those things that’s usually out of our hands. If you self-publish or write for certain small presses, you can certainly commission your own cover or do it yourself, but with most publishers that’s not the case. You may get some input or none at all, but mostly you just wait for an email to show up and hope for the best.
I’ve mostly been lucky in this regard. A fellow writer who shall remain nameless recently shared his despair at the cover choices being offered by his publisher, which were generic at best and butt-ugly at worst. Five minutes with an AI art generator produced better results. For this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d go through the covers of my five published books and pull back the curtain on how they came to be.
For my first book, Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, I commissioned a cover from a friend before I’d even begun submitting the book proposal. Jana Christy is a brilliant artist who has done comic books, children’s book illustrations, and is now the creative force behind the beautifully macabre Rag & Bone Dolls. (Check out her recent exhibition Dear Death.) Back when I was writing Hick Ficks, she agreed to do the cover in exchange for the CD of her choice, which was probably the best deal I’ve ever gotten in my life. I described the image I wanted, which was basically a mash-up of redneck cinema tropes: a hillbilly drinking moonshine by a swamp while an eighteen-wheeler pursed by Smokey flies by overhead. She delivered perfection, and fortunately when I signed with McFarland for the book, they agreed to use it as the cover.
My next book, If You Like The Terminator…, was part of a series of If You Like books from Limelight Editions, so there wasn’t much leeway in terms of the cover. I’m not sure I was consulted at all, but what else was it going to be? It’s a picture of the Terminator with the If You Like logo slapped on it. No rocket science involved here. The follow-up, Stephen King Films FAQ, was also part of a series from Applause Books (Both Limelight and Applause were imprints of Hal Leonard, and I think both are long extinct), but in this case I was given a selection of potential covers to weigh in on. I just dug through my old emails and found the images, and I have to say a couple of them look better to me now than the one we ended up with. I don’t mind the minimalism of the existing cover, but there’s a really cool one with skulls made out of smoke that I’m surprised we didn’t go with. Oh well.
That brings us to the Hard Case Crime era. Anyone with passing familiarity with Hard Case knows there’s a house style. The covers are throwbacks to the pulps of the mid-20th century and generally feature an eye-catching woman—or three, in the case of Charlesgate Confidential. (Actually, there are only two women on the cover, but one of them is depicted in two different timelines.) For my first novel, I was lucky enough to get a Paul Mann cover. Mann has done the cover illustrations for a number of Hard Case books, including Forever and a Death, Killer, Come Back to Me, and The Big Bundle. On this one I was sent sketches and given a chance to offer feedback. As I recall, my only suggestion was that the redhead from the eighties timeline might have bigger hair. A revised sketch proved me wrong—it was just too jarring—so I wisely shut up and left it to the artist. Certain relatives may have found it too racy, but the finished version works beautifully.
Lowdown Road has its roots in the drive-in exploitation movies of the seventies, and the cover by Tony Stella captures that beyond my wildest dreams. It looks like the poster for a movie that never was (but hey, maybe will be someday). I believe this is Stella’s first cover for Hard Case, but surely won’t be the last. As you can see from perusing his work here, the Lowdown Road cover is right in his wheelhouse. This one came together unbelievably quickly—I think we had sketches within a week of signing the contract, and the finished painting not long after that. If you feast your eyes on Amazon’s bestsellers in crime fiction, you’ll know I’ve been very lucky.
Tony Stella rules!
Awww! Thank you! I forgot I got a CD out of the deal! I wonder what I picked.