Dragaera

Physical book defects and such (No SPOILERS)

Tue Aug 12 09:42:21 PDT 2003

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 12:22:42PM -0400, Alexx S Kay <alexx at TheWorld.com> wrote:
> > That and the fact that Steven got Fabio to pose for the cover.
> Don't blame the author for what the cover artist did.  Authors
> almost never have any input into this process, and are quite often
> appalled at the results.  

Agreed.

> Also, remember that the job of a book
> cover is *not* to accurately represent anything about the contents;
> it's job is to help sell the book.

Ah, but what few realize is that GOOD ART will help sell the book 
a lot better than bad art.  The downside is that good art takes a 
long time.  For instance, I doubt anyone would dispute that the 
cover art of Michael Whelan is far-and-away the best stuff out 
there.  But if you want him to do your book cover, you send him 
the book (when YOU are done with it, mind) and he'll get back to 
you in a year or so.  At least, so I've heard.

> [Not that I have any particular complaints about this individual
> cover myself; this is just a recurring argument.]

There are a lot of worse covers than LoCB.  I could argue with 
the quality of the cover art a bit in technical terms (it's 
too obviously a painting, for example -- this would have been 
amusing if Steve had put a "Morrolan gets his portrait painted" 
scene in the book), but in terms of what it's portraying, I have 
no complaints.  It's the classic Conan/Elric pose, and that's 
exactly the type of character that Morrolan is supposed to 
represent.

-- 
Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org)
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