UC-Berkeley Marching Band Does Nintendo-Themed Show

It’s ironic but true, for this erstwhile designer at least, that the brightest, freshest cover ideas seem to come for the least-commercial books. There’s a lot to be said for the idea that obscurity provides designers with the freedom to experiment, but it’s freedom from the editorial as well as the marketing department. As a member of the editorial-production team, I’d say that the marketing people usually if not quite always are as reasonable to deal with as the editors.

Years ago, I once came up totally dry on a freelance cover/jacket/case design project for a university press, after hours of sketching and trying out everything imaginable: it just wasn’t coming. I returned all the materials to the client, with my godawful sketches and an apology; few things are harder than turning down work. Any good marketer would have found someone who could have done the cover properly. Instead, the treacherous, duplicitous, back-stabbing m.e. cheerfully forwarded the whole mess to the editor, who sent it one to the author, who of course loved it. So I kept the job after all, completed it to the satisfaction of all concerned, and became responsible for committing imo the ugliest exterior ever put around a book. The things we do for money . . .

Having spent many, many years in university press publishing, I can tell you that the environment conspires to come up with the worst possible cover/jacket designs. Between the authors and the editors (who have no idea what beauty is being created in the design departments of the trade publishers–and who appear most of the time as if they dressed themselves in the dark in a closet with the lights off), you were lucky if you came out of the decision process with a cover that only looked 30 years out-of-date. I’m only tangentially involved with academic books now–but they can be spotted a hectare away by their unrelenting ugliness.

Good story ;-) As a freelancer, sooner or later everything happens to you. Which is worse – getting paid for bad work or not getting paid for good work? Being self-employed doesn’t mean that no **** happens – but at least it isn’t the same **** year in, year out from exactly the same people. If about half the work you do is stuff you like and the total pays the bills, life isn’t too bad.

At West Virginia University Press we work hard to develop covers that we, authors, and the public will be delighted by. We generally get covers out of the way pretty early, since that is the first thing the public will see. And we tend to develop interiors that then harmonize well with the typographic sensibility of the cover design. And we always, always, always, get the author’s buy-in before moving forward, because nobody can sell a book as well as a proud, happy author. Guess we’re anomalies.