'Genre Cover of the Month'… what do you think?

Filed by: Darren Turpin on February 2, 2007 at 8:36
Filed under: Books

I'm thinking of experimenting with a 'Genre Cover of the Month' feature / accolade, to run alongside the series of pieces I'm going to be writing soon on the art, craft and science of genre book covers. It'll be for a number of reasons: to generate research material for the articles, out of interest to see what sort of response this sort of thing might be able to generate, and as a bit of fun as well.

Decisions - Yes, by 'Woodsy' via www.sxc.hu Here's the general idea:

1) Any reader of The Genre Files will be welcome to submit up to three covers for a given month's accolade. Ideally, they should be covers of new books first published in that particular month, but we'll see how that goes.

2) At the end of that month I'll select a shortlist (length dependent on number of entries) of either the most-nominated, or just the best-looking (in my humble opinion) of all the covers that have been submitted that month.

3) I'll set up a poll so folks can vote for the cover that they feel should win the accolade. Voting will stay open for the following month (or two) to allow as many TGF readers as possible to participate.

4) I'll then declare a winner (bearing in mind that February's winner might not be unveiled until April or May), and attempt to get in touch with the author, publisher, publicist and cover artist (if applicable) in question, for any comment they might like to make as to why they chose that particular cover design, what techniques they used to achieve the effect etc.

5) There might also be a 'wooden spoon' category, depending on how mean I'm feeling, to give folks a chance to name and shame the worst covers they see (although we might have to find a way of omitting self-published authors, it'd be like shooting fish in the proverbial hogshead).

6) I might (depending on how generous and/or flush I'm feeling) send some sort of Amazon voucher themed prize to the person who nominated the winning cover in the first place, as a thank you.

7) We'll see how it goes. Like I said, it's an experiment at this stage and if it doesn't take off, then no harm, no foul.

Do let me know what you think, folks. Would you be interested in joining in? Or is it a dumb waste of time? Or is it already being done on hundreds of other blogs, and I've just been too damn lazy to check? Comment away, and in the meantime, I'll get some rules & regs drawn up and posted to a permanent page.

Filed on: February 2, 2007
Filed under: Books
Tagged With: book-covers | Genre-Cover-of-the-Month

Comments

6 Responses to ''Genre Cover of the Month'… what do you think?'

Joe on February 3rd, 2007 7:41 pm

Hi, mate,

This sounds quite interesting and I'll need to remember to blog it on the FPI. One question before I do that though - what parameters are you setting for defining what you want as 'genre' books? I'm assuming given your normal context it will be SF&F, horror, slipstream etc, but of course genre could also mean slushy romance, Western, noir etc. Also wondering if graphic novel covers would be included? Be quite interesting that one too - since it is primarily a visual medium. Or if you don't want to include GNs (which is fair enough) what would you think of me maybe 'borrowing' your idea and doing a GN cover on the FPI blog while you do the books, cross-promote them and see what happens? Might be one of those ideas that sounds more interesting than it turns out to be, but you never know till you try these things. Drop me a line if you think it might be worth a bash, if not I'll still happily pimp the book cover idea anyway :-)
Ariel on February 4th, 2007 9:24 pm

Well, it's all up in the air at the moment, mate. Be happy to let you run the GN end of things though mate, I was pretty thinking of sticking to sf / f / h for the time being and seeing how things go...
Joe on February 5th, 2007 11:03 am

Yeah, thought you might be sticking with the books. Tell you what, as usual I have too many other bits to deal with right now, so will hold fire and wait till you start this up properly, then maybe see about a GN/comics version - would be interesting to compare them. Give me a shout when you post your page on it and I'll give it a mention. And on the topic, I'd nominate for February the Orbit cover for Already Dead by Charlie Huston, which is a helluva lot better than the US version I think.
Ariel on February 5th, 2007 11:06 am

Cheers Joe. Which reminds me, best get that rules & regs page written up and posted at lunchtime...
Ed on February 5th, 2007 10:47 pm

But which lunchtime?
Ariel on February 6th, 2007 7:34 am

Ah... the immortal question :)

But thank you, well chivvied...