Over at Fantasy Book Critic, Robert reviews Blood Ties, book one in the Castings Trilogy and concludes:
“… Pamela Freeman’s “Blood Ties” will probably be one of my favorite fantasy novels of the year and I absolutely can’t wait to finish reading the trilogy…”
Read the whole review here. You can catch an interview with the author over at Grasping the Wind, and visit the author’s site at www.castingstrilogy.com.
Jennifer Rardin stops in at Scifi wire to talk about the latest in her Jaz Parks series, Biting the Bullet. Next up in the series is Bitten to Death, out in August, and One More Bite, out in January 2009.
On the PaperCuts blog Dave Itzkoff has a very cool little interview with physicist Michio Kaku on the reasons we won’t teleporting, time traveling, or – er — precoging anytime soon. Left out of his theory, however, is whether investing in the Time Travel Fund increases your odds, so I’m still hopeful.
Following up on the post below, the cover debate continues here, here, here and elsewhere. I left a comment at Lou Ander’s blog that explains a bit more on our approach to cover design.
One thing to add: a few people have expressed the view that for a publisher the most important thing about a cover is that it appeals to buyers (those people in the book industry who determine whether or not–and in what quantity–a book gets on to the shelves). For us, that’s not true. Of course, it’s a great advantage if a buyer loves a cover we’ve come up with; and it makes things more challenging if they don’t. However, we–and I’m talking only about Orbit here, to be absolutely clear–have one thought in our mind when we’re thinking about covers: how to make it as effective as possible for the widest possible readership. And by “effective”, I mean visually exciting, distinctive, and appropriate to the book’s content and style.
Of course, we listen to buyers, we talk to buyers, we take buyers’ feedback very seriously, and we’ll sometimes change a cover as a result. But we don’t ask ourselves: what kind of cover would the buyers like? We ask ourselves: what kind of cover would potential readers like?
Another aspect of this issue that’s sometimes overlooked is what the author thinks of their cover. Some authors are more interested in their covers than others–some prefer to leave it to their publisher, others have very strong views on what they would like. Either way, I’m often struck by how revealing an author’s reaction to seeing a visual representation of their work can be. In my experience, authors themselves can be great judges of whether a cover works or not. One author reaction to seeing her cover for the first time summed it up for me when she said: “That’s exactly what my book looks like!” For her, the cover had captured something exciting and important about the book and made it instantly recognizable. If a cover doesn’t achieve this–at least to some degree–I think it’s unlikely to be a particularly effective cover.
I guess it all comes back to what one considers to be an effective cover.
2 mins and 18 secs is all it takes Philip Palmer to make me want to read Debatable Space (US/UK) again. See Philip talking about his stunning debut novel here:
The web-comic Unshelved took a look at Jeff Somer’s The Electric Church over the weekend. Check it out!
Ron Hogan at Galleycat and a poster at Metafilter have recently drawn attention to the covers of of three Orbit authors, Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod (Orbit in the UK only), and Iain M. Banks (Orbit in the UK and US).
For the most part, when we publish an author in the US and the UK, we publish with the same cover — and some of those covers are developed in the US and some in the UK. The cover for Iain M. Banks’ MATTER, for example, was developed in the US, whereas CONSIDER PHLEBAS and PLAYER OF GAMES were developed in the UK.
If we felt that a book would appeal to a wider readership if it had a different cover in the US or UK, we’d give it a different cover. But usually we don’t. Not everyone will agree with that — but that’s fine.
Going back to the Galleycat comments, we don’t really have any rules when it comes to covers, but there’s one thing we always do first when we’re discussing them: we decide what it is that excites us about a particular book/series/author. What makes it stand out? What makes it different to everything else out there? And then we ask ourselves: how do we reflect that in the cover approach? What kind of look would be the perfect way to reflect what we think makes this particular book/series/author special?
What we don’t do is think: this book is epic fantasy therefore it has to have one of these covers; this book is military SF therefore it has to have one of these covers. And so on.
And it’s not just the cover illustration/design that this relates to — it’s the format, the production values, the entire package for a book.
This is the issue, I think, at the heart of the Great SFF Cover Debate/War. It’s nothing to do with where the book is being published in the world; it’s to do with the question that every genre publisher has to ask themselves: do we want our books to stand out or do we want them to fit in? Most genre publishers would say both: they want their books to stand out by looking exceptional, but they also want them to fit in by being immediately recognizable to readers of similar books within the genre. Depending on where you put the emphasis, though, the cover for a particular book can go in some very different directions.
Orbit is a publisher of genre fiction, and we’re proud to be a publisher of genre fiction, but at the moment we definitely seem to be putting more emphasis on trying to make our books stand out. Why? Check out the SFF section in your local book store. How quickly can you find a book from a writer you don’t know that excites you because of the way it looks? Hopefully, you’ll find something quickly and the book itself will turn out to be just as exciting as it looks. That’s why we like our covers to stand out.
Here’s video, along with the complete audio podcast, of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod’s readings and conversation at last weekend’s Aye Write! festival in Glasgow.
If you haven’t discovered the Culture yet, check out this post at Slashdot by reviewer (and astrophysicist!) Simon DeDeo. For US newbies we can heartily recommend either Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games, both out this month from Orbit.
The News At 10:00 last night carried the sad story that Sir Arthur C. Clarke had passed away, some three months after his 90th birthday.
Although best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke’s work encompassed so much more than just an iconic date. The Fountains of Paradise won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards and his brilliant Rendezvous with Rama went one better by adding the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The scenes at the opening of Independence Day, of giant spaceships appearing over the Earth’s major cities, is straight out of the majestic Childhood’s End, written over forty years earlier.
His incredible body of work is reason enough to consider ‘greatness’ an entirely appropriate adjective, but Clarke was so much more than simply a science fiction writer. He gave us Clarke’s Three Laws; he served in the RAF during the Second World War, where he was involved in the development of the early warning radar defence system; and in a paper published in Wireless World in October, 1945, he practically invented the telecommunications satellite.
When I heard the news last night, I went upstairs and took my copy of The Collected Short Stories off the bookshelf. I’ve read pretty much everything Clarke’s written over the years – certainly all the solo works – but it has probably been over twenty years since I’ve read any of his short stories. As I looked down the contents page trying to decide where to start, it was like reading a Shakespeare play and seeing all the quotes leap out. An unremitting catalogue of brilliance stared out at me: here was Loophole, there was Rescue Party; The Wall of Darkness, Nemesis, Second Dawn, All the Time in the World, The Lion of Comarre, No Morning After, A Meeting with Medusa, “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth. . . “, Encounter at Dawn, Expedition to Earth, The Other Side of the Sky, Transit of Earth, The Wind From the Sun, Against the Fall of Night.
Those who know anything about Arthur C. Clarke will have spotted three glaring omissions in the above, and of course, that’s where I started. I re-read The Nine Billion Names of God, then I re-read The Star, and then I re-read The Sentinel. In some cases, the prose style may have dated a little, but the concepts and the execution are as powerful as ever. If you’d asked me as a teenager what reading Arthur C. Clarke felt like, I’d have said ‘having my brain pried open and the universe poured in’. After reading those stories again last night, I’d say my teenage self had it spot on.
We lost one of our Greats yesterday. Farewell, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the world is poorer for your passing.
