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Honest Westerns. Filled with Dishonest Characters

We've selected our book cover for No Peace. We chose this one out of a set of six prototypes. As you can see, the photo is watermarked, but I have since bought a use license. All that remains is the final art work. Getting close.

I'm not one of them!

Some people are visual. I'm not one of them. But I appreciate good design, even if I'm incapable of drawing a straight line with a ruler. In school, I took drawing and drafting. I received a dubious C in both. (I did better in English and history.)

Writing and design come together in book covers. Every book, even an e-book needs a cover. And people really do judge a book by its cover. (See Judging a Book by its cover.) I'm always interested in cover design because book covers are so key to book sales. Flavorwire has done a fun piece on 75 Vintage Dust Jackets of Classic Books. Here are a few examples that struck my untutored eye.

Not included in the Flavorwire article, but still one of my favorites.

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Book cover ... by design

Vintage Photograph to Western Book Cover

These Guys Will Kick your Butt

Do readers judge a book by its title?

Everyone knows the old axiom that people shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but do they also misjudge books by their title? I don’t know. I suspect a great title can get readers to look further, a horrible title stops further inspection, and a mediocre title doesn't influence sales one way or the other.

The Barnes and Noble Book Blog posted an article “12 Books With The Most Irresistible Titles.” Good Titles, but I always liked Lonesome Dove because it sounded intriguing.

The Great Rehearsal might be the worst title I've encountered for a great book. Carl Van Doren wrote one of the top three history books on the Constitutional Convention. The book was published in 1948, when the United Nations was just starting and Van Doren thought the 1787 Constitutional Convention was a rehearsal for writing the UN charter. This poor title probably dampened sales of a fine history book.  Ironic, since the book never mentions current events except in a slapped together preface.

I've never agonized over my own titles, except for Tempest at Dawn, my own book on the Constitutional Convention. Since this was a novelization of the convention, I needed a title that didn't sound like a history book. I still like the title. Perhaps I should have agonized more over my other titles. The Steve Dancy Tales: The Shopkeeper, Leadville, Murder at Thumb Butte, The Return, Jenny's Revenge, and Crossing the Animas are pedestrian. I like The Shout Mouth Society because it connotes secret society intrigue, which is the plot of this contemporary novel. Principled Action is a lousy title and may have affected sales of this nonfiction book about the founding period.

Authors may not be the best at selecting titles, but I’m not sure focus-group driven editors are better. My title for my computer technology book was Dinosaurs and Whippersnappers, but Wiley insisted on The Digital Organization. I still prefer my title.

Honest stories filled with dishonest characters.

Steve Dancy in New Jersey? What's that about?

Still from The Great Train Robbery

The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale partly takes place in New Jersey. Oh yeah, and Thomas Edison is a character in the latest story. Dancy fans need not worry; Steve has been firmly converted to an unabashed Westerner. He has good reason to visit New Jersey and it will take someone toughened by the Wild West to sort out the mess in Menlo Park.

Serratelli Hat Company

New Jersey may not be the Wild West of the mid nineteenth century, but the Colt revolver was invented in New Jersey, Annie Oakley called New Jersey home, the Serratelli Hat Company is based in Newark, John B. Stetson came from New Jersey, and the first Western movie was filmed in New Jersey. Six shooters, western hats, and the birth of Western movies: that ought to be enough to give New Jersey a Western pedigree. Besides, Edison needs Steve and his friends to sort out a few problems or he may never complete his electrification of Wall Street.

Edison, has the curriculum vitae to play a role in a traditional Western, especially one where the protagonists are miners, not cowboys. Thomas Edison’s contributions to mining included new techniques in blasting, conveying, crushing, and magnetic separation. His greatest mining invention was the electric cap lamp. 

As for his cowboy credentials, he has none, but his company produced the very first Western feature film. In 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company distributed The Great Train Robbery.

Edison clowning with Henry Ford

You might notice his name in the upper left hand corner of the title frame. I believe this makes Mr. Edison a cowboy at heart, which in my mind gives him the right to cavort in a Steve Dancy Tale.

The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale by James D. Best

These guys will kick your butt!

Bandits' Roost, Photograph by Jacob Riis, 1887

New York City gangs were notorious. This historic photograph appealed to me because in The Return, Dancy must defeat a street-gang to save himself and his friends. The feud starts in Leadville, Colorado and follows our hero east. I liked the photo so much, I suggested that it be used for the cover.

Final cover for The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale.

This is the full cover. I especially like the cowboy shadow the designer added.

The designers did a great job. As I mentioned in Get a Spine, the spine is crucially important because it is all a browser will probably see in a bookstore. Here are the six spines for the Steve Dancy Tales.

Do people judge a book by it's cover? Do book covers sell books? Yes and yes. Need evidence? Here you go.

You might also enjoy Vintage Photograph to Western Book Cover.

Center Point Will Publish The Latest Steve Dancy Tale

I returned from my trip to Nebraska to find a publishing contract from Center Point for The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale. They’re a great group of people, so I signed and posted the contract immediately. My understanding is that Center Point has the large print version of The Return slotted for the first quarter of 2014. (Trade paperback and ebook formats will be available this summer.)

I’m thrilled that Center Point will have published all four of the Steve Dancy novels. It also pleases me that the first three books have earned past their advances. That probably explains why Center Point bought the large print rights to The Return sight unseen. That’s a compliment I feel really good about.

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The Future of Large Print

Judging a Movie by Its Opening Credits

They tell us to never judge a book by its cover ... but we do. Likewise, we probably shouldn't judge a movie by the title design. The Film Before a Film is a short Vimeo documentary on movie credits. I like filming family movies and editing them with Final Cut. It's a great break from writing. Besides I have exceptionally cute grandchildren. At least, I think so. Anyway, film credits have always been an interest of mine. Television credits, as well. Two of my favorite TV credits are CSI  and Modern Family.

I found this short entertaining, as well as instructional. Someone should do a similar documentary on book cover design. (Here are a few pulp fiction covers I like.)




THE FILM before THE FILM on Vimeo.

Judging a Book by Its Cover

February, 27, 1860

The Shut Mouth Society is a contemporary thriller about a conspiracy that goes back to Abraham Lincoln. The novel was published in 2008, which happened to be the Lincoln Bicentennial. It opens with Lincoln's Copper Union address on February 27, 1860, prior to his nomination for president. On the same day, he had a photograph taken by Mathew Brady. (Lincoln claimed the Copper Union address and Brady photograph made him president.) A book cover that used this photograph would tie into both the novel's introduction and the Bicentennial. My designer came up with a unique close-up cropping that really showed Lincoln’s intelligence and determination. I thought it couldn’t miss.

Big miss. Sales were lackluster and customer reviews on Amazon and Goodreads were mediocre to scathing. Sales were hurt by an avalanche of nonfiction books released to take advantage of the bicentennial, and early buyers of The Shut Mouth Society assumed it was another book about Lincoln. A few even bought it because they assumed it was nonfiction. Although the story did include extensive Lincoln history, the novel was a modern-day chase thriller in which the protagonists desperately try to unravel a one hundred and fifty year old conspiracy.

I could have given up on the book, but The Shut Mouth Society was a finalist for Best Novel in the Glyph Awards, and it had received excellent reviews in the general press. We decided to try another cover design. You can see both of them side by side below. 

The new cover worked miracles. Sales increased dramatically and customer reviews were effusive. At the time of this writing, the book has 161 Amazon reviews for 4.3 stars, and 491 ratings on Goodreads for 3.7 stars. I’m pleased with the Goodreads numbers because the newer rankings had to overcome dismal early returns. 

Nothing changed but the book cover.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because we’re in the final throe of designing a book cover for The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale. We had many concept mock-ups, but I rejected many of them because despite being nice graphically, they didn’t fit the story. I learned my lesson. Covers build reader expectations. This is why genre covers look alike. They’re designed to appeal to an audience that will appreciate the book. So don't believe the cliché that people should never judge a book by its cover. People do. 

Insist on a well-designed cover that fits your storyline.

You might want to look at Flavorwire’s “20 Embarrassingly Bad Book Covers for Classic Novels.” Many of these are a hoot. 

Author Photos ... Art or artifice

All I need is 70,000 words and a great head shot

Supposedly, a good author photo can help you connect with the reader. I’m not sure what difference it makes what you look like … or looked like, since many authors don’t change their photo for decades. Typically authors try to look intellectual, serious, hip, casual, friendly, dangerous, happy, or just pretty/handsome. It all depends on what image they want to tie to their books. If an author can’t convey enough personality in a studied pose, many just add a pet to the picture. Everybody likes a man with a dog.

Here is something to remember; the product is the book, not the individual who wrote it. Most writers are introverted and make lousy dinner guests. At least this is true for this author. My characters banter with ease, not me.

I once mentioned to Clive Cussler that the best kind of celebrity was being an author. Most famous authors can enjoy privacy in public, but only need to drop their name whenever they want to trade on their fame. He smiled and told me that was why his author shots were from a distance standing next to an antique car.

Don’t overly worry your author photo. My suggestion is to try for something natural. Write a great book and few will care what you look like. Just ask Jane Austen.