Wednesday Cover Story: Matching the season…
25 September, 2013
This week, we got word that In Falling Snow, by Mary-Rose MacColl is one of the Top 50 Bestselling Fiction titles in the USA, and a Top 5 Historical Fiction Bestseller in Canada. It is a wonderfully moving novel set during the First World War and inspired by the real-life women of Royaumont, who set […]
Wednesday Cover Story: A cover both unoriginal and original…
18 September, 2013
This week, Susie brought in a copy of the Man Booker Prize nominated book, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki , sporting a spineless design. This would have been interesting if I hadn’t already seen this unorthodox packaging on the cookbook Pulpo (see my previous cover story blog). With Pulpo however, aside […]
Wednesday Cover Story: The sideways cover…
11 September, 2013
This week I came across the book The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer, which (as far as titles go) sounded, well, yes, you guessed it, interesting. But what I found most interesting (ok, I’ll stop it now) was the cover. I’ve mentioned before that I have a penchant for typographical covers, and I like the designs […]
Wednesday (um, Thursday) Cover Story: Every little detail counts
5 September, 2013
I have just returned from a ten-day break in sunny Madrid. So if you were wondering what had happened to our Wednesday Cover Story yesterday, well, it was having a nice siesta by the pool. However, as I caught up with emails and tweets today, I spotted a tweet from @paddyhoey which has given me […]
Wednesday Cover Story: autumnal picks
28 August, 2013
As we approach the end of August, the sunshine has become more unreliable, the morning air makes me shiver and darkness is falling earlier in the evenings. The publishing world is reflecting that autumnal feel with some of the covers planned for the next month or two. Take the following similar examples: Paul Torday’s Light […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Crustaceans Covered
7 August, 2013
Like anything, when it comes to book covers there are trends, but I wonder whether here in the UK our designers might be thinking with their bellies of late. I didn’t expect two books this summer to catch my eye thanks to a bright orangey-red lobster slap-dab in the middle of a fresh white cover. […]
Wednesday Cover Story: One Book, Two Looks
31 July, 2013
Recently I was lucky enough to receive a copy of R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, courtesy of a lovely friend at Random House, its publishers. I’m looking forward to reading this, which has had great success and brilliant reviews – in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s the frank, moving, and (I hear) sometimes funny story […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Sneek peek of Over a Hot Stove
24 July, 2013
I spent many happy hours as a child sitting with my family watching Upstairs, Downstairs, and now am counting the weeks until Downton Abbey returns to our TV screens again. And here in the A&B office we’re equally excited about the upcoming release of Over a Hot Stove, by Flo Wadlow – a delightful memoir […]
Wednesday Cover Story: The Morganville font strikes again
17 July, 2013
Last year we spotted the Gothic font used on our brilliant Morganville Vampire covers on the signage for Sweet Revenge – a cupcake store in Kingston. Now I’ve spotted it in South Wimbledon, this time on the signage for a tattoo parlour, Collector’s Ink. A tattoo parlour certainly fits in with a Morganville-esque theme. Tattoos […]
Wednesday Cover Story: How good is that book spine?
10 July, 2013
Yesterday I attended the Bookseller’s Marketing & Publicity Conference which featured a wide range of interesting speakers covering topics from creative campaigns, discoverability, the Amazon algorithm, Facebook and Goodreads, and more. Steve Bohme, from Bowker discussed market research and revealed rather suprisingly that customers, when browsing in a bookshop, primarily browse books on shelves (as […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Little Children becomes an A&B Classic
3 July, 2013
One of the first A&B books I worked on when I joined the company was Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, and it remains one of my favourite reads. The trade paperback got rave reviews, the mass market paperback became a Top 10 Bestseller, the novel then hit the big screen in a film starring Kate […]
Wednesday Cover Story: The Not-So-Brilliant Cover…
19 June, 2013
The same day the advance copies of the upcoming Kate Forsyth novel The Wild Girl came into the office last week (and everyone collectively swooned at its cover – have a look), I got home to find a delivery of a book I’d ordered for a university class next year; The Man Who Loved Children […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Mary Nichols’ Hungarian look…
5 June, 2013
Mary Nichols’ books, The Summer House andThe Girl on the Beach have interestingly been very popular in Hungary. And now we’ve just recently sold rights to The Kirilov Star. The cover design to a foreign edition can look extremely different to the UK version, and more often than not wouldn’t appeal to a UK market […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Sneak peek of new Lake District mystery
29 May, 2013
The new Lake District mystery by Martin Edwards, The Frozen Shroud, will be out in June and advance copies came in the other day. We originally started printing this series with matte covers but gave the last book, The Hanging Wood a glossy finish instead to make the yellow tone more vibrant and eye-catching. It […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Making hardbacks extra beautiful…
22 May, 2013
During the Fall of Night Book Tour, after Rachel Caine had finished signing books for fans at Waterstones in Bournemouth, I was admiring the cover to A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré (with its embossed gold foil) and chatting to the manager about how much effort is going into hardbacks now. Gone are the […]
Wednesday Cover Story: The thought-process behind the cover to A Little Murder
15 May, 2013
Sometimes, after reading a book or manuscript, I can conjure up my own ideas of what could go (or could have gone) on the cover. And then there are other times where I wouldn’t know where to start. This, of course, is why our cover designs are left to our talented Art Editor, Christina… A […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Creating the design for The Lavender Keeper
8 May, 2013
While our Art Editor, Christina, can often create a cover design that is so perfect from the get-go that it requires not even the tiniest of tweaks (that’s how brilliant she is), the process of creating a cover can often be a more collaborative process. Designs can change to accommodate a new quote for the […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Fancy renting out the house on this book cover?
1 May, 2013
It’s the 1st of May, the sun is out and had my first lunch in the park with no coat on. Summer is finally just round the corner and I can start looking forward to summer life: picnics and bike rides, ice-cream and beach-time, staying out late on those long warm nights, walking barefoot on […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Getting readers’ seal of approval
24 April, 2013
We often spend days, weeks, months mulling over cover designs and it’s always interesting to hear what people think of our covers. And of course, it’s particularly nice to hear readers think we’ve done a good job, especially when we’ve reprinted a book and revamped the cover with a new design… you hope readers will […]
Wednesday Cover Story: Six decades of Casino Royale covers
17 April, 2013
This month marks 60 years since Ian Fleming published Casino Royale – the first James Bond novel. One of his biggest fans, Mike VanBlaricum (whose fabulous last name could be used for a Bond-villan character) has contributed to a new exhibition in Illinois, The Birth of Bond: Casino Royale at 60, showcasing how the book […]
Wednesday Cover Story: The new Simon Fonthill cover
10 April, 2013
Fire Across the Veldt is the upcoming new novel in John Wilcox‘s acclaimed Simon Fonthill series – which sees Fonthill recruited by British General Kitchener to Cape Town to fight the Boers. And the cover is one of our new favourites. There’s something innately historical and quite beautiful about the colouring – the slight sepia […]
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