Sylvia Weber, Why Book Covers Are So Important – Author Guest Post 7.15.09

THE WOLVES’ KEEPER LEGEND…From the beginning of time, it seemed that rivalry between man and wolf was at the root of man’s dislike for the animal, discovered only too well by Sealgair. Was his fate forever to be condemned to isolation, to see terror and hate in the eyes of the ones he once loved? All he could see in his mind was the last picture of Awena’s beloved face, which he carried in his heart for all his life.

Was the only way out to discover the special secret held by the papyrus-pearl in the stone pot – what secrets could this hold? And which stone pot could keep that precious secret when there were so many of them?

Seanns’ quest to find the pearls and uncover the secret ended with tragic consequences, resulting in him not only discovering the truth of his birth and who his real mother and father were, but the realisation that his father lived among the wolves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR…Sylvia Weber was born in Abrantes, Portugal, on 20th June 1968. She started writing at the age of twelve, sending articles to newspapers and participating in school contents. Graduating in Modern language and Literature, her whole career was dedicated to teaching and developing the children’s greatest potential. A wide diversity of interests took her to a life of researching and studying a variety of subjects such as languages, phytotherapy and painting. A strong belief in dreams took her to the United Kingdom at the age of thirty-nine, searching for a place to call “Home”.

This book was written when I was twelve years old (1980), which makes it, even for me, something rare…

Check out her blog at http://rockthecage.blogspot.com/.

AUTHOR GUEST POST…My first book cover was a wolf, over a yellow surface, surrounded by hieroglyphs. The wolf is a hero of this story, the hieroglyphs… Well, what have the papyrus-pearls got to do with the wolves? A mystery that only can be solved by reading the book. This Wolves’ Keeper was written in Portuguese, I signed up as Margarida Malcata, because the books in Portugal could only be subject to publishers’ appreciation with a pseudonym. Malcata is the name of the biggest wolf reservation in Portugal.

This cover didn’t work and I didn’t keep it. It was imperfect, done by drawing and gluing. The book was indeed very primitive in aesthetic patterns, but it was the best I could do, with very poor technical resources. The content was good, though. I thought that it would be enough.

My husband conceived the second cover. He worked many years in Photoshop and Corel Photopaint, so he knows all the techniques. His cover had a wolf howling to the moon on the top of a rocky mountain, and the silhouette of a dark dragon, blowing fire in the depth of a cave. The dragon had the pearls under his claws. The magic sword was raised, and the lightning sparking from the blade.

This cover had several essays, with different colours, to find the best balance and the most attractive sample. We went to the public and asked “Which one do you prefer?”

We arrived to a final decision, a cover that showed the dragon, the pearls, the sword and the wolf over a parchment surface, and this was the one sent to the publishers and agents with the sample chapters of the book or, in other cases, with the complete manuscript. We were hoping that, by seeing that beautiful cover, the reader wouldn’t feel tempted to put the samples in the bin without even reading. I mean, the cover could attract a second look, perhaps better than a pile of paper.

That’s why the covers are so important. In a bookstore, in a shelf full of books of different kinds and genres, the cover must attract the eye. Falling in love with a cover, at first sight, is the first step for a customer to pick up a book from a shelf and look in the back, to see what is written. Then, the information in the back might mean the difference between buying or not. This is like a dish in a restaurant. It might taste like heaven, but the customer chooses it by its presentation. Between the wonderfully decorated dish with no taste at all, and the delicious one with poor decoration, the customer chooses the first. Then, after trying it, he might want to taste the second, but a fact is a fact.

I know that people feel attracted by different kinds of images, but there are enough studies of psychological motivation, used in publicity, which relate the purchasing of a product with colours, with shapes and the cover designer can’t close his eyes, in my opinion, to those studies. There are colour symbolisms, colours related to tranquillity, colours related to attraction… The colours have a meaning, a language of their own and can tell a world about the book… Or shut it down in a concealing silence.

Lately, I’ve seen some very poorly designed covers in many bookstores and I only can relate this fact to the need of the publishers to save money in printing. Who knows? I also saw a book, with a magnificent cover, brilliant colours, excellent printing, and I immediately picked it up to see what it was about. That’s the way it works and the publishers, in marketing terms, could think that a little bit more investment could bring rivers of revenue…

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