Cover, my arse

A common piece of advice to indie writers is to have a professional design your book cover. I'm in two minds about that one, myself. There are plenty of bad self-made ebook cover designs out there, sure. Monstrously bad ones. But then go into any bricks-and-mortar bookshop and you'll see an equal number of hideous, awful, wretched abominations created by so-called professional designers too. Most of them are entirely indistinguishable from their neighbours on the shelf and seem to have been copy-pasted from some vast bank of stock-images. It's so rare to find a book cover that rises above being merely adequate that few really stand out -- "The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick DeWitt, being an exception I often come back to. It's simple, stylised, and yet has another level; the outline of the two stylised gunmen against the moon behind them, creates an effective skull motif. I like it a lot.

In fact, although I have rarely ever been attracted by a book cover, I've often been repelled by them. It would be fair to say that I'm mostly repelled by them, if anything. I realised the other week that I have a whole list of cover-crimes that prevent me from picking up a book in a bookshop. Sometimes it's a certain title or subtitle, but often it's just the image. The book itself might be a colossal work of literary genius, but I'll never know because the cover has made me flinch away in disgust. The following list is not exhaustive, but gives an example of my rampant coverism.

1) Anything with a pastel image of some woman in period dress is out, obviously. I don't care if the author is the next Bronte.

2) Anything with a man carrying an AR15 or AKM. (Remove extra points for having a call-sign in the title.) It's going to be a cookie-cutter tale with an identikit hero and a plot about a bomb being hidden in a city. Or in a plane. Or on a boat. The hero's name will be something like "Jack Cutter" or "Jason Slade" and he'll be a jaded ex-special-forces soldier.

3) Anything with "An Inspector (insert name here) Mystery" as a subtitle. In fact anything that names the hero on the cover. It just screams book-farming to me -- someone who cranks out half a dozen titles a year without thought or attention, knowing that they'll sell to their hard-core fans and no-one else. I don't look down on such prolific authors, by the way, it's just not the sort of thing that I can read.

4) Further to point 3) any police procedural. I loved them when I was younger, until the moment I realised they were all exactly the same book.

5) Any sultry looking vampires. Actually, anything with a hot young person on the front cover. I am not your demographic.

6) Anything with a faux-naif home-craft sort of cover and a quirky title. You know the sort. A felt cut-out of a cow or a house or a car. A title like "The Blackfoot Indian's Guide To French Polishing".

7) Anything called: "The (insert quirky profession's) Daughter".

8) Anything with a spaceship on the front. Again, I used to adore hard sci-fi as a kid, just not anymore.

9) Anything that has been made into a TV series or film. I don't know why. Probably just a holdover from the days when every film had a terrible novelisation cranked out to accompany it. Completely unjustified, I know, but now it just seems like the mark of anti-quality to me.

I'm not saying any of these books, or even these covers, are bad necessarily. They simply repel me personally. YMMV, as they say.

Putting all my ironies in the fire

Authors are constantly asking themselves why certain books succeed, while others, (usually their own,) fail to generate much interest. We are told, by those who are grizzled with battle-scars and paper-cuts, that we should simply write a superlative book and it will eventually sell itself. That's what sells; good writing. Case closed.

Until we look at the 50 Shades... phenomenon and that theory falls apart like a quivering secretary in the arms of a perverted executive. The author is richer than you'll ever be and good luck to her. I won't generate bad karma by ragging on another author, but maybe you need to have it read to you to get the full benefit.

Well, E.L. James just "tapped into a market", didn't she? Yes, she did, and very successfully. But what the hell does "tapping into a market" even mean? If we knew that, we could all do it, right?

It's perception. People perceive that "everybody" is doing something, and people are social animals. They don't want to be excluded from the group by going their own way and doing their own thing. You can't make friends with someone if you have nothing in common, so, in order to have the best chances of success, you need to do what is common to the most people. Do what everyone else is doing. Follow the herd. Even if you hate the latest fad, at least you can talk about it; at least you're engaged in following it. You can laugh at Twilight in conversation with all the other people who hated it, but you still bought into it as a cultural phenomenon, didn't you? You still saw the movies or read the books, because you didn't want to miss out on the zeitgeist.

And herein lies the problem. The premise of almost everything I write is that: conformity erodes self. Now, with supreme irony, I'm having to do what everyone else is doing, in order to tell my readers to follow their own path. And yes, you can now follow me on the hive-mind of Twitter.

So, I'll leave you with the opening lines of the old Cop Shoot Cop song, "Discount Rebellion":

Our survey told us what you wanted,
Rebellion at a low, low price,
Be an individual through our product,
Why jeopardise your life?

(Words by Tod A.)

It's all about the writing in here, pal.

This is the blog of M.J. Mahoney.

I'm an author, not a celebrity. That is, I'm a sort of medium through which the ghosts of stories make themselves known. I write them down as they come to me, hoping to do them justice, lest their vengeful spirits haunt me in the night. Sometimes they do, regardless.

So, don't worry about all that mundane shit out there. You can leave it at the door with the hat-check girl. In here, the lights are low and faces are strange and things move in the peripheries of vision. Everybody's high and the world is haunted. We're between the cracks and behind the scenes and under the floorboards.

It's a masquerade, pal, but it's honest. It's all a conceit in here.