The road less taken, and overtaken

There seem to be inevitable affinities with certain book jackets.

Here is a cover I did for Garry Disher's Wyatt, a return of his eponymous anti-hero after ten years absence (the Wyatt series is excellent crime). I shot the photo in a dark and narrow place of my acquaintance. Earlier this month, Wyatt won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Fiction.



Led Zeppelin inverted: a stairway to hell. That was made in October last year. Earlier, around March, we were discussing the cover for Peter Temple's new novel, Truth. We eventually settled on an image by Bill Henson (his very slow site) whose photographs have covered several of Temple's books: a picture of a road turning into blackness. The gift for the title, of course, is that the road is bent - very suitable for a story about a troubled cop in a troubled town.



Truth went on to win Australia's most prestigious book prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. That it was won by a crime novel excited a good deal of comment, including from myself. Author James Bradley proably had the most incisive post about it.

A friend of mine tells me he has borrowed Truth from his local library in a country town. It's a hardback, and it's an American edition! What are libraries doing, buying overseas editions of books by local authors? Not helping the local book industry, is the correct answer. I didn't know of and hadn't seen the US cover. Here you go:



In my highly biased opinion, it's not even half the truth.

An author you can love

Click on the image to enlarge.

The kind of author a designer wishes for. I have just done a jacket for a debut author, SJ Watson, who lives in Britain. Text, where I work, seem to have produced the first cover for the book, which will be published in 20 languages(!).

Having worked in the NHS for fifteen years, he can't quite get used to being real author yet. In his blog, he writes: "Yesterday, though, it felt very real. I woke to an email from the team at Text, who are publishing my book in Australia and New Zealand. 'We are delighted to show you our cover...' it said. I was still half asleep, but felt almost too anxious to open the email. What if I hated it? What if it looked like the kind of book I wouldn't look twice at? The cover design is so important - probably the main reason someone picks up a book in a store (or, presumably, clicks on it in an online store?) - and the wrong jacket might put off a whole host of potential readers.

So, anyway. I did open the email. And I love the cover. I think it's perfect. It's designed by the art director at Text, Chong Weng Ho."

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This is the cover:



He adds: "The text at the bottom says 'The best debut novel I have ever read.' - Tess Gerritsen. That bit I am particularly happy about!"