Picnic Books

Bored with bodices?

It’s only my second blog post and already I’m fed up of seeing a picture of myself, so maybe later in the week I’ll ask Picnic to put up a photo of my dog or something (though there are certain people who will claim not to be able to tell the difference).

The reason why the picture of me is there in the first place is that, unlike the previous bloggers, I haven’t got a cover design for my book yet.

Cover design was something I didn’t really think about when writing Kill-Grief – finishing the book was enough of a challenge. Isolated in my obsession with my 18^th-century world, I had no way of knowing whether publishers would adore my efforts or whether my manuscript would be the most pathetic dead creature that the slush-pile cat had ever left on the doorstep. It felt presumptuous to imagine the cover.  

Now, though, the reality looms. A little while ago I had to fill in a marketing questionnaire, which asked whether I had any suggestions about the jacket. I didn’t really know, so I wrote down some vague idea about a gin bottle. More recently I’ve been dreaming of a moody, monochrome seascape with a silver foil title. Next week it’ll be something else.

I therefore await Kill-Grief’s cover design with both excitement and trepidation. Will it be a detail from Hogarth? Will it be abstract and almost contemporary? Will it be a portrait of some random 18^th-century lady? Or one of the recyclable images shown on  www.libraryjobpostings.org/reusable-covers.htm ?

As the book is quite dark in atmosphere, I should be safe from the hearts, flowers and swirly writing that some publishers assign to anything that happens to have a woman’s name on it. There’s also little likelihood of a child’s shoes and poignantly saggy ankle socks against a soft-focus grassy background.

Of more danger, however, is the ubiquitous headless woman. She is so much of a hist-fic cliché that it’s even a cliché to blog about her, but she nevertheless sells bucketloads of the novels she adorns.

This poor beheaded woman has, uncomplainingly, worked hard to make historical novels look sumptuous and irresistable. She has sent Elizabeth Chadwick’s sales through the roof. She doesn’t appear on Richard and Judy* because their selector Amanda Ross apparently hates her, but she has been known to grace prize shortlists. I like to think of her as a single careworn individual, struggling into an 1860s day-dress and posing her hands elegantly in her lap, then nipping off for a fag and a poke of chips before resignedly putting on a farthingale for the next photo.

Lots of historical fiction fans are bored of this anonymous woman. The rest see her as a friend – a trustworthy marker of a story they’re likely to enjoy. I waver between these two groups, groaning at the apparent cynicism of the design and yet being compelled to pick up the book and read the blurb; sometimes I even fork out some cash. And that’s the point – headless bodices (or, if I’m going to be nerdy about it, bodies) are still money-spinners. A cover designer’s job isn’t to manifest the whims of an author but to create something that the publisher thinks will sell, and if that means decolleté frocks, well – why not? I therefore suspect I won’t be disappointed if Kill-Grief’s cover features that long-suffering woman, sporting 18^th-century clothes – although I must apologise to her that they’ll have to be fairly scruffy ones.

(* I have, though. When R&J used to broadcast from the Albert Dock in Liverpool, I walked past the window behind them and waved.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.