Judging A Book By Its Cover

My historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress, currently an E-book, will soon be released by Wild Child Publishing in print. Sales so far have been modest. The cover, shown here is essentially colorless, of a Roman frieze depicting the conquest of Rome over Britannia. I chose it originally because it symbolized not only the victory of an imperial force over an indigenous people but the gender connotation. Rome, the victor, is masculine, while Britannia, the vanquished is depicted as feminine. Indeed, many of the Celts who resisted Roman conquest were female and my novels protagonists are dominantly female. So the metaphor was apt.

But as we head for a print version of Flight of the Sorceress, I have come to realize that good metaphors do not necessarily make for good covers. That old sop, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” may be true enough, but readers do buy books based upon the covers. And you can’t judge a book until you read it. So the first step is to get the potential buyer to pick it up. Color helps there.

Although my editor, Marci Baun, and I have reached a consensus: The Flight of the Sorceress needs a new cover, front and back, this make-over has proved to be no easy task. We have honed down our goal. We want a picture, preferably a stock photo that includes a young, pretty redheaded woman, who might represent Glenys, the heroine of the story. The picture must be time-sensitive, as the story is set in the fifth century A.D.

My search involved several key words: Woman, Druid, Sorceress, Celt, Roman, ancient, classical, priestess, alchemist, Goddess, antiquity. I searched Google. I looked at all the stock photo sites. Then, when I found something that might be appropriate, I confronted

copyright issues.

But I started with a big mistake —Photobucket. A lot of people put pictures up on Photobucket. The site requires that the posting person have copyrights, but that doesn’t mean much because the site doesn’t seem to police the postings. You will find the same picture being used on several different websites. You frequently will not find any reference to copyright holders. Are these photos in the public domain? Can you use them as a cover picture on your book? Do you want to test the issue by getting a lawyer letter and then deciding whether to pull back all your print versions, or to fight it out and spend way more than you’ll ever make on your book? Here are some nice photos that I found on Photobucket but couldn’t use because there was inadequate copyright information.

 Maybe you can negotiate. Pay a licensing fee after the fact of printing. It is possible. But that lawyer the copyright holder has paid to enforce the copyright wants to prove his worth and knows he has you over a barrel. On the other hand, the copyright holder is getting a lot of free exposure for her work. Good book cover exposure can’t ever hurt, and the better the book does, the better known the copyright holder of the cover rights will be.

Marci and I looked as a couple of very nice potential cover photos. 

They are the work of fine artists. 

Licenses for these images as book 

covers are prohibitive. 

I looked at a stock photo site for a rendition of Pharos, the Alexandria lighthouse and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The copyright agent that licenses rights wanted over two hundred Euros for the rights. It’s a standard, non-negotiable fee, regardless of print run, likely sales, or any economic reality I can see. Crazy.

          

So that brought me down to stock photos.Stock photos though are no panacea. Though there are literally thousands available, many simply show up as too contemporary. Facial expressions are frequently inappropriate. Poses seem contrived. Costumes, where they exist at all, are garish, or the women look like whores. Some are cartoonish. Some are kitsch. Wrong messages abound. 

I looked at www.istockphoto.com/, www.dreamstime.com/ www.shutterstock.com, www.123rf.com/, www.photoxpress.com/ and www.bigstockphoto.com/, I spent hours plowing through their trash photos. It was like I was the victim of some crime and the cops set me down with twenty-five years worth of mug shots. But the alternative is to hire an artist. I’ve done that.  I even supplied a cover photo to help it along. It cost me around $500 and that was in 2001. I think that cover could have come out better. But it was also a big chuck of change considering that I made 1000 sales in total.

I know we need a new cover for The Flight of the Sorceress. I know it will improve sales. So here is the rough outline of what we came up with. Obviously, it will be tweaked. Go ahead. Judge the book by this cover. Does this work with the title, and what you know about the book? Let me know what you think.