Sunday, April 29, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 26
Many people reading
this will be from the new medium of e-book writing. Given the extraordinary
sales of e-readers over the last couple of years, it is obvious that this medium
is going to be the main outlet for creative writing in the future. The
previous blogs seem to me to be equally appropriate for physical and virtual books but there
are notable differences that are worth a note or two.
Producing your book
for Kindle, IPad or Sony (apart from a reliance on teckie knowhow, yours or an
agency’s, to translate your book into an acceptable format) gives you a great
deal of power over your finished product. It is you who decides how pages look,
what font, what glyphs (symbols that act as dividers within chapters) and what
cover. In other words you become a designer-writer. Some of you will baulk at
the very notion, preferring to stick to what you think you know best but others
may find this previously barricaded world, worth breaching. I read a friend’s
new book this year and the cover looked as though it had been designed by an
android. It had nothing to recommend it. Remember that a great
percentage of buyers in bookshops buy books after being attracted by their
covers. Now, when you buy e-books, you also have a facsimile cover to help
persuade you.
My three recent books
(five if you split Azimuth into its three volumes) gave me a great deal of
pleasure in the formative stages of designing their covers. In two cases I gave
the book to a designer to read and also outlined a rough brief. She (Hollie
Etheridge www.holsterdesign.com) offered a variety of interpretations for me to look at. I chose what
was nearest to my projected vision and suggested amendments and then, through
this iterative process, all was accomplished, a JPeg was sen to me and I uploaded
it in the relevant area of the site.
The front cover has to
grab. Since Azimuth is a
multi-layered, historical fable, the cover had to represent mystery,
Tale-telling and adventure set in a Persian empire. Hollie produced the
following:
In The Strange Attractor, a crime novel
with echoes of Raymond Chandler, the aim was to have that nourish, amoral feel
to it, harking back to the forties and fifties:
With Through a Mirror
Clear: a Gothic Romance, I worked with my wife who is excellent at PhotoShop.
This probably allowed even more hands-on decision making. The aim was to
represent a novella which tells a tale about rupture in family life and which
explores the capacity of the mind to deceive and inveigle:
So, you see, creating
a book can be extended by new technologies and the author can have an even
greater sense of omnipotence over his or her world!
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Romance
Labels: Writing hints: telling a book by its cover. E-book design.
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