Not exactly branching out .. recent Penguin covers
In older days, it was easy to identify a crime and mystery book by its cover: slap a damsel in distress, preferably in a more or less acceptable state of undress, into the artwork, some judicious shadows and a villain with a gun, and presto: pulp is us! But those halcyon days are over and a book must now appeal to a wide audience as likely to buy their paperbacks in supermarkets, cash and carries and other sedate environments as well as bookshops. And lo and behold: blandness is us.
Following the initial breakthrough of John Grisham's best-selling legal thrillers, it felt as if every crime book cover sported a gavel, a pair of scales and a statue of justice (plus or minus a dagger or a letter opener). Today, for reasons I cannot fathom, trees are in. Could it be that some designer a few years back had a traumatic and formative experience in his childhood and still wets his bed following recurring nightmares involving menacing trees whose branches sway in the breeze and now believes we all suffer from the same affliction?
The indispensable Rap Sheet blog recently did a rapid, unscientific census of recent crime covers featuring tree imagery and came up with 40 books. Sure, some of these are evocative when the arboreal theme is balanced out with strong graphic and colour tints, but the overall effect is one of sameness. Why this lack of imagination amongst publishers? Well, as one of the covers shown by The Rap Sheet was actually one of my own books, might I provide a clue?
I assemble an annual anthology of best mystery short stories by British authors. My then publisher for the series came up with a reasonable cover for the book which had me neither raving nor raging (authors and editors at my level are contractually merely consulted by publishers about their covers).
When the book was presented to the crime fiction buyer at WH Smith, he gently suggested that if I wanted a larger order and a good place in their promotion plans, would it not be a good idea if the book looked more like an Orion title? Orion are the publishers of Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Harlan Coben, etc... and, you guessed it, love to feature atmospheric trees on their covers. Which is how I was landed with trees. And, ironically, it worked as that book outsold all my others that particular year!
But how many stock photographs of moody trees are there in picture libraries? Not enough it appears, as Penguin have recently been caught out by that pesky tree cover virus. Much to the dismay of their respective authors, they have managed to publish two separate crime books: Jim Kelly's The Coldest Blood and John Rickards' The Touch of Ghosts just a few months apart sporting the very same image of a lonely tree swaying over some desolate moor. Only the colour tint differs.
As the tree-felled Rickards writes in his own blog:
"I mean, different publishers using the same stock photo, sure, maybe. Different designers working for the same publisher (almost certainly the case here), uh ... well, OK. But when both writers have the same editor and the books came out in one form or another within a year of each other ... Dude. That's fucking weak."
What have trees done to you?
