Thank you and for that anecdote. What an amazing and appalling story. The racist implications of the spin are quite shocking. Happily those days are behind us now . . .
Such an interesting topic, as always! It reminded me of a row some years ago between Australian author Justine Larbalestier and Bloomsbury over the cover of 'Liar', which featured a white girl although the novel was about a black girl! They corrected the error in time but I always found their justification amusing and have just hunted it out: "we (regret) the original creative direction for Liar – which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup – has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity"... spin par excellence...
Thanks Vincent. Very interesting story about Paul Lynch and the Prophet Song cover. Yes it is unusual for a cover to cross borders. Different markets tend to have different tastes and hence to favour different styles of cover. The Prophet Song cover is very striking and memorable. As is the novel itself.
This is a fascinating post on a topic I had never given much thought to. I do recall hearing Paul Lynch and his publisher in discussion last year where his publisher expanded on the commercial importance of both cover and title choices.
Interestingly, the publisher remarked that Lynch had a really firm view on the correct cover for Prophet Song and wasn't for shifting on it. She accepted he had been quite right...and proof lay in the fact that for paperback and all international markets they kept the original version, which is most unusual it seems.
Thank you and for that anecdote. What an amazing and appalling story. The racist implications of the spin are quite shocking. Happily those days are behind us now . . .
Such an interesting topic, as always! It reminded me of a row some years ago between Australian author Justine Larbalestier and Bloomsbury over the cover of 'Liar', which featured a white girl although the novel was about a black girl! They corrected the error in time but I always found their justification amusing and have just hunted it out: "we (regret) the original creative direction for Liar – which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological makeup – has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity"... spin par excellence...
Thanks Vincent. Very interesting story about Paul Lynch and the Prophet Song cover. Yes it is unusual for a cover to cross borders. Different markets tend to have different tastes and hence to favour different styles of cover. The Prophet Song cover is very striking and memorable. As is the novel itself.
Aisling
This is a fascinating post on a topic I had never given much thought to. I do recall hearing Paul Lynch and his publisher in discussion last year where his publisher expanded on the commercial importance of both cover and title choices.
Interestingly, the publisher remarked that Lynch had a really firm view on the correct cover for Prophet Song and wasn't for shifting on it. She accepted he had been quite right...and proof lay in the fact that for paperback and all international markets they kept the original version, which is most unusual it seems.