How to use this Page

In this two-part guest blog post, designer Isaac Stewart and Tu Books Executive Editor Stacy Whitman discuss how they came up with the final cover for our new YA fantasy, Vodník:

Isaac: Before brainstorming ideas for a book design, I usually get a few pieces of key information from the editor:

1.     What age-range and demographic do we want the book to target?

2.     What would the editor like the cover to convey?

3.     What has the author said they would like to see on the cover?

Here’s how Stacy answered:

1.     The book’s design should appeal to both female and male tweens and teens, but should specifically target the male teen.

2.     Stacy wanted a cover that felt ominous, fantastical, with a dash of whimsy.

3.     Bryce [Moore, the author] specifically mentioned that he found covers with bold shapes and colors both beautiful and striking. But if we decided to go for a more photographic cover, he wanted to see the vodník statue or Trenčín castle.

Trenčín Castle

He also suggested full-color interior illustrations by Michael Whelan, that the exterior title be in dripping water and his author name be on fire. He also asked for a trip to the moon and a hard drive loaded with Scooby-Doo reruns.

Both Stacy’s and Bryce’s input was invaluable in creating cover concepts. I had long conversations with each of them, trying to find that image that would really fit the book. Though their ideas were sometimes disparate, there was still some overlap that I hoped to be able to harness.

So I set to work reading the manuscript. The goal I kept in mind was this: Find a design that would compel the right audience to pick up the book (and make Stacy and Bryce happy in the process).

Stacy: You’ll note that Bryce had quite a bit of input into the process here. With a smaller company, it’s easier to coordinate with the author for suggestions. While we still have to take marketing information just as much into account when planning covers, we want our authors to be happy with the end result. Their ideas help inspire the designer and I think the covers are better for it. I also show my authors concepts–once we’ve narrowed it down to the best possibilities–so they can point out things I might have missed. (For example, Karen Sandler rightly pointed out that we had accidentally put the tattoo on the wrong side of the main character’s face on Tankborn!)

Isaac: I made notes of particularly visual scenes and looked for reoccurring details and symbols that could be translated into the book design. I’ll admit that several times I lost myself in the reading of the book and had to resurface for air and make notes after the fact! (You’ll see what I mean when you get to read the book later this month. It’s breathtaking. And not just because there’s an evil water demon who wants to drown the main character.)

2 Comments on Design 101: How a book cover gets made, last added: 3/9/2012

It’s HERE! We are super excited to share the cover of Vodník by Bryce Moore, out this March from our Tu Books imprint. About the book:

Short version: Slovakian fairy tales! Roma characters! CASTLES!!

Long version: Vodník is a YA contemporary fantasy about Tomas, a Roma teen who moves with his family from the US back to Slovakia and discovers that the folk tale creatures he befriended as a young boy are more dangerous than he knew, especially a vodník who has begun drowning local townspeople (deaths for which Roma like Tomas are blamed). When he learns that his own cousin’s life is in danger, Tomas makes a deal with Death to save her – but can anyone cheat death forever?

And here, dear friends, is the cover in all its glory:

Extra points if you can see the vodník’s face in the background.

Stay tuned for part II, where we reveal the cover of Kimberly Pauley’s Cat Girl’s Day Off, also out this spring from Tu Books. And meanwhile, let us know what you think!

In case you didn’t notice, I did not post a Ulysses update on Monday. I took Monday off from work figuring that since Bookman and I would be spending the weekend making a dent in putting the house back together it would be nice to have an extra day to recuperate. But it turned out that I pretty much spent the whole day reorganizing my red room, taking everything off the bookshelves, dusting, and weeding out some out-date-reference books and a few other books as well. My shelves are tidy and my books more organized and, even better, I have room on the shelves that I thought were packed full! So very happy about that.

All that to say, I didn’t make it through the 50 pages of episode 12 of Ulysses. I am about 20 pages in and enjoying it very much, but I am a little gloomy that I didn’t manage to keep up the pace of one episode a week and am now dragging episode 12 out across several days. Oh well. Next weekend will see things righted.

No sense in dwelling, I have a book of short stories to tell you about. I received Jason Sanford’s Never Never Stories as a e-book review copy in the midst of my summer of short story gorging, or rather, what was to me short story gorging.

Never Never Stories is made up of mostly science fiction with a couple of fantasy stories at the end. I found the stories to all be imaginative beyond the usual science fiction offerings.

“The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain” takes place on a planet where the weather is made by ships from space passing in the skies overhead. In “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees,” people become ill and die when they touch each other, turning into a crystalline tree that holds the person’s memories that other people can interact with when they prick themselves on the tree’s thorns. Then there was one of my favorite stories, “Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” in which “shadows” consume people. Imagine trying to live in a world in which a shadow can kill you.

“Rumspringa” imagines the Amish and their lives and place in a technological future in which people have computer implants in their heads and will pay a lot of money for the chance to experience the memories of a “real” life. In “Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime,” we visit a world in which money and capitalism have been abolished but over time a new form of trade and debt has come into being that may or may not be worse than using money. Or there is “Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas” in which the names of people in town who will die at sea mysteriously burn themselves into the skin of a young woman. And these are just a few highlights.

I especially liked that all the stories were so very different. Not once did I feel like I was reading the same story told differently. And on top of that, they are well-written too with lots of pleasant surprises in terms of character and plot and unusual settings. Many of the stories have been previously published in magazines and several have been nominated for prizes and a few of them won. It is a good collection and good reading if you are inclined toward science fiction or something out of the ordinary.

Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin turned out to be a great fun read. I could have barreled through it, but managed not to because I was in the middle of a bunch of other books at the time and then the floor project got started.

Game of Thrones is epic fantasy with a large cast of characters, sword fighting, political intrigued, good guys, bad guys, and guys whose allegiance is on the side it is most expedient to be on at the moment. There is murder, attempted murder, and betrayal as those not in power try to get more power and those in power try to keep their power. Then there are the people who are innocent or honorable and only want to do what is right and good and suffer at the hands of those who don’t give a fig. There are no wizards but there are wights and the Others about whom we don’t learn much other than they are a threat of some kind. Oh, and there may or may not be dragons.

One doesn’t read this kind of book for character development or discussion of philosophical questions. This is the kind of book one reads for the plot and the sheer fun and surprise of what will happen next. Some of the characters do manage to be well fleshed-out or are hinted at becoming more important in later books.

One of the things I liked about this book is that there are a number of female characters, there is even a woman who fights in a very large battle at the end, because there always has to be a battle. Her part is small and brief, however. The women in this book are smart and calculating. They know what’s what and have power and authority of their own. There is also a girl of eight or so who is one of my favorite characters, Arya. She can never manage to be a lady and it really pisses off her older sister who sets her sights on marrying a prince and believes in love and romance and knights in shining armor. Arya’s father gives up trying to force her into being a girl and hires a water dancer to teach her how to fight. Water Dancers are sort of like ninjas with a sword.

That’s about all I can say regarding this book. If I say more I will give things away and that is no good. Bookman is glad I am finally done with it though. He has been eager to watch the TV series. Hopefully the series to date doesn’t go past the first book since that is as far as I have gotten. The second book won’t make it to my reading in-progress pile probably until the end of October.

I finished Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime a couple of weeks ago but have had trouble getting around to writing about it. Not because it is a bad book. On no, this was lots of fun. But with my house in upheaval because of the flooring project and projects at work wearing me out too, and the difficulty I always feel I have in writing about short stories, I just haven’t been able to give myself the time and brain power to compose a post. Today I figured, for better or worse, it is time to stop putting it off.

This collection was really good for a number of reasons. First, the stories are all by women. Second, they are all “fantastic” in one way or another and I always complain to Bookman from time to time about there being so few scifi or fantasy books by women that are standalone. Third, There are a number of authors in the collection of whom I’ve never heard so now I have new authors to pursue so I can find me some good fantasy fiction by women.

The stories in this collection range from fairy tales to straight out bizarre, but bizarre in a good way like “Hot, Fast, and Sad” by Alissa Nutting which begins:

I am boiling inside a kettle with five other people. Our limbs are bound, our intestines and mouths stuffed with herbs and garlic, but we can still speak. We smell great despite the pain.

There is a wonderful story called “Song of the Selkie” by Gina Ochsner. A lighthouse keeper fell in love with a woman he found on the beach. We know she is a Selkie and he pretty much figured it out too by the time his wife swam back out to sea, leaving him to raise their twin daughters. Being raised in a lonely lighthouse and the daughter of a selkie makes you not quite like the other kids, especially as the girls approach puberty, when, the legend goes, their mother will return for them. The father hires a nun who doesn’t quite fit in with the other nuns of her order, to live on the island and homeschool the girls. All the while also trying to keep the girls from the sea. But the girls find pieces of fur from their mother’s fur coat and they finally know who they truly are:

Erlen, beyond bewilderment, fingers the skins. Next to him is Sister Rosetta, her lips moving silently. Guide them, she prays. Her prayers stand tiptoe to press against the invisible beating heart of God. Guide us all. She understands, looking at Erlen, looking at the skins her folds into halves, into quarters, that none of them has ever been quite right for this world, casting about in skins they aren’t quite suited for.

Erlen turns to Sister Rosetta. “They’re not coming back, are they?

Karen Russell’s “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach” features unexplainably large flocks of seagulls appearing one day. But these aren’t ordinary seagulls, they are cosmic scavengers, stealing scraps of people’s lives for their nest.

Samantha Hunt’s Story, “Beast,” features a woman who suddenly begins turning into a deer at night.

Kelly Link’s “Light” is classic Link. It’s like looking at the ordinary through a prism that skews the world just a little bit. People with two shadows? And one of those shadows can split off and become a person? And warehouses of Sleepers, people who are found alive, but in a deep sleep from which they can’t be awoken. No one knows where they come from or who they are/were. The beginning of the story cracked me up. A man is sitting at a bar defacing a children’s library book. Our heroine sees him and…:

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I’m a children’s librarian. Can I ask you why you are defacing that book?”

“I don’t know, can you? Maybe you can and maybe you can’t, bu

Add a Comment

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde is pure Fforde zaniness but different. Different than Thursday where you just hold on and go for a ride. And different than Nursery Crimes, which, while not your run-of-the-mill mystery is still a mystery. Shades of Grey has, dare I even say it, a serious side to it. I was not expecting this seriousness and always got caught without page points or a pencil and failed to mark a single passage. It never once dawned on me to turn down even a tiny corner of a page. So I am flying from memory without review of notes and have not passages to quote.

Fforde has created a really interesting world where people are ranked according to the dominant color they can see. No one can see the full spectrum of color. You are either red or yellow, green, blue, purple or grey. We don’t know how the “colortocracy” came about nor do we know why variations of color blindness exist for everyone. We know that there was Something That Happened. We know there were the Previous whose society sounds very much, but not quite, like our own.

The Collective now runs the world and everyone must follow the Rules handed down in the book of Munsell. For some reason every dozen or so years, there is a Leap Back in which it is declared that a particular technology can no longer be used. So cars are allowed but only if they are Model-T’s. Building new Model-T’s is against the Rules so there are not many cars and the ones that do exist are owned by the village in common. Bicycles are allowed but only ones without gears. One of the oddest things is spoons. People are allowed to use spoons but no one is allowed to manufacture any spoons. Therefore spoons become great possessions that are registered to owners and passed down within families.

You are given merits and demerits and those who achieve a certain number of merits are allowed to get married. Those who reach a certain number of negative demerits are sent off to Reboot on the Night Train. Supposedly they are re-educated and sent to live in a new town and that’s why no one ever sees that person again.

Because no one can see the full natural color spectrum, synthetic color, which people can see, is very important. Towns pitch in merits to be connected to the color grid so they can have synthetic color piped into their village. “Color gardens” are a town’s pride and joy. Synthetic color is piped underground and connected into a garden – flowers, grass, trees – to color them synthetically so everyone can see them.

East Carmine, a village on the Outer Fringe of civilization, needs a temporary Swatchman because theirs met an unfortunate death. A Swatchman is a doctor but in a society where color is everything, showing people a series of color swatches will cure their cold or arthritis or whatever ails them (there are limits though). Looking at particular colors will also make you high. Eddie Russet, 20-years-old and soon to be color tested, is sent to East Carmine with his father to perform a chair census to help him learn humility. The reason he must do the census is because he had the nerve to suggest a new method for queuing using a number system.

Eddie pretty quickly learns that there is something not quite right going on in East Carmine. Eventually he has to decided whether he wants to live a quiet “normal” and comfortable life according the the Rules or whether he wants to “run with scissors” and face the truth hiding behind the Rules.

I think Fforde is stretching himself into a new and interesting direction here. The book is filled with Fforde humor, but there is also an underlying message. Granted, that message – facing the truth, don’t blindly follow the rules, etc. – is not a new one and is kind of cliched. But the world Fforde creates is so interesting that I didn’t mind the cliche too much.

This is the first book in a new series. Sh