The search for a killer cover

My steps towards cover design ... and a very difficult quiz

Hello and welcome to Making Crime Pay! I love being a bestselling children’s writer, but I also have a secret plan to write crime for adults. So I’m sharing my creative paths here and useful things I’m learning along the way.

I read way too much and review my favourites so you can enjoy them too.

Thank you for being part of my journey and community. Thanks to everyone who is reading this and everyone who kindly supports me and my writing.

Nicki

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Never judge a book by its cover . . . really?

It’s a well-known saying that you should never judge a book by its cover. But where did that saying even come from? Just how much more important could a book jacket possibly be???

I think it might be because if you look at some very old covers, some of them are very bad indeed.

So here’s a quick quiz. Can you guess the titles of these two very well-known books from these (very old) jacket designs?

Answers at the bottom of the page

Clue: one of them is a Sherlock Holmes (you got that much, didn’t you), but I bet you never thought the other is a Miss Marple.

Why my bookshelves are like a potted history of jacket design

You can almost read the minds of some of the early jackets designers. It's the lure of a splash of blood and a dead body that are bringing in the readers - right? So that's exactly what you need on the cover.

Today jacket design has become a clever and clear indicator, something that encourages a casual browser to take a closer look. A promise that inside they are going to find a story they enjoy reading.

I guess book jackets are as much victims of changing tastes and ideas as anything. So I took look on my shelves at some books I’ve had there for ages. One I found for Christie’s The Caribbean Mystery is too gruesome to even want to show here. Sure I don’t remember that story being quite that nasty!

I loved the story in Mrs McGinty's Dead and I remember that giant fly on the jacket - but would that make you want to buy that book if it wasn't by Agatha Christie? (And do I remember a fly in the story . . . ?)

But some are also brilliant

My favourite crime fiction jacket of all time has to be for Death in the Clouds.

This time a wasp really is a pivotal part of the plot (genius story with that genius cover). Once you’ve seen it who can forget that giant wasp attacking a plane?

Having made the bold decision to go it alone with my delve into writing crime for adults, I’ve been very focused on jacket design. This is one of the key parts of my self-publishing journey. I learned a lot from from my trad publisher of my first six books, Chicken House, as the cover designs were brilliant.

My debut novel

To make a success of self-publishing, I am following the step-by-step Page to Published course run by JD Kirk. The advice here is all about finding a jacket image that speaks to your ideal reader. So I followed the advice and found the kind of vibe I feel is in my book on the covers of some similar, existing books. And considered what would appeal to those readers.

Here are a few covers from my vibe board

One of my biggest secret weapons is that I get to work with the super-talented Falmouth-based artist Holly Astle for my cover. I’m excitedly looking forward to doing my cover reveal soon - but I do need to get a few more things set up before I’m ready for that reveal! So I cannot show it to you yet. But clue: it is breathtakingly beautiful!

In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak!

First editorial feedback

After having an editor recommended to me only a few weeks ago, I can say I’ve already had first feedback from her! This is a revelation of doing the publishing yourself, because in-house editors are generally very overworked and it always took months between me sending in the manuscript and getting any feedback. (During which time I got more and more morose, assuming the slowness was because it needed so much work). But usually it’s just because they haven’t got around to reading it yet.

Anyway, this is my first book for adults, so I sent it for feedback with huge trepidation. So I was thrilled that as well as making lots of smart suggestions to make the story tighter and clearer and picking up on my formatting errors, she said: the story is really good, and I absolutely LOVED being surprised—that rarely happens!

It’s difficult to express how joyful that made me feel, or how much anxiety a writer (not just me) has that they might have written an absolute dud. Because you get so close to your own work it is genuinely difficult to be objective about it. Which is why you need an editor. Thank you Hanna. Happy to pass on her contact details if anyone needs a brilliant freelance editor.

Here are the Quick Quiz full cover reveal answers

How many of you guessed this is one cover of the very first Miss Marple mystery The Murder at the Vicarage? The blood clinging to the edge of the desk like a rug. And what is with that giant ear?

Thanks for reading

Nicki