I Am Going To Cry

As most wannabe novelists are wont to do, I sometimes like to go into the bookstore and play the “Imagine-Your-Book-Is-There-On-The-Shelf” game. This mostly involves going to the Science Fiction and/or Fantasy section of the bookstore and finding the “S” area, and making a space in the shelf between surnames that begin with “R” and “Sc” and then… I win the game.

Okay, I never said it was a good game.

Anyway, while doing this, one thing was made abundantly clear. People who aspire to photorealistic painting or illustration techniques thrive on genre book covers. While not all of them are this way, for the most part, the vast sea of SF/F book covers tend to blend into each other as a result of a simple three step process:

1) Insert mystical/futuristic landscape

2) Insert mystical/futuristic building/ship in landscape

3) Insert main character(s) standing in foreground looking heroically off into the distance brandishing their sword/laser pistol

If Fantasy, predominant colors are green and brown. If Science Fiction, predominant colors are green and blue.

This is all terribly depressing. The novel I just finished, The Pale Summer, is for lack of a better term, an urban fantasy. At one point, for a chapter or two, it does have a fairly large tree (Of epic proportions) that appears in it, and since that’s the only recognizable “typical” fantasy element in the entire book, my fear is that the publishers are going to glom onto that one thing and give me a cover that has a mystical landscape with a giant tree in the background while the main characters stand in the foreground looking heroically off into the distance while brandishing their swords. Even though they don’t use swords. As a result, around the house, the new lament whenever I see another lushly illustrated, Tolkien-esque cover is, “Stupid, giant, magic tree…”

The fiance had warned me that she was in no way going to be happy with whatever cover I might end up with once the book went to print. To alleviate her own sense of design outrage, she said she was going to make her own cover for us to use on our house copy, one that she would actually be happy with. What she didn’t tell me was that she was going to do it soon. She made one yesterday, and now I’m incredibly morose because I would love to have this cover, and I know it’s never going to happen.

What an infintely depressing thought.

For those of you who are curious, here it is. You can click on it to see the full size version:

It appeals to my relentlessly 80’s aesthetic of having that Nagel-esque minimalism to it. If this book should actually get published, I am seriously considering sending this off to the publishers as a mock-up and asking them to at least consider this before resorting to the Stupid, Giant, Magic Tree cover, but I know it’s hopeless. Oh well, at least my consience will be clear and I can say I tried. And at the very least, we can still take this and use it as intended, for our own personal copy, so at least one book on the planet will have a cover I’m happy with.

Stupid, Giant, Magic Tree…