Under Cover

You know the old line about not judging a book by its cover? Well, as reader and writer I can tell you that it’s a big fat lie. We all judge books by their covers, especially when confronting a veritable tidal wave of them on the shelves and tables of our local Barnes & Noble or indie bookstores. Book covers instantly convey information about the kind of book and author we’re considering. They whisper, they tease, they cajole, seduce and shout. They are of vital importance and so we ought to just own up to that fact: what’s on the cover is crucial to getting a potential reader to actually pick up your book and look inside. And as the author of six novels, twenty-six books for children and the editor of two essay collections, I know what I’m talking about.

When my first novel, THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS, came out from Doubleday in 2002, I was pleased with the cover, which was dramatic, bold and intriguing. The dark background suggested the novel’s darker aspects and the centrally placed violin suggested the curves of a woman’s supine body. The cover was designed to appeal to women but not exclusively so; a man might read the book with censure or embarrassment. This, although I did not fully understand it yet, was a huge plus.

My second book with Doubleday, IN DAHLIA’S WAKE, came out three years later. The cover photo—a delicately washed out image of a townhouse in brownstone Brooklyn—was evocative and gender neutral—good things—but also a bit tepid and unmemorable. The book did significantly less well and I wondered whether the cover might have played a role.

When I published, BREAKING THE BANK, novel #3, I had switched publishers and was now at Downtown Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. Unlike the first two books, which came out in hardcover, this one was a paperback original. The cover, which showed a woman from behind over whose red umbrella a shower of bills rained down, was good—specific to the book, and attention getting in its own right. But the lone female in the red coat was beginning to inch toward women’s fiction, a neighborhood I would soon inhabit more assertively with the publication of novels #4, A WEDDING IN GREAT NECK and #5, TWO OF A KIND.

The cover of A WEDDING IN GREAT NECK depicts not just a woman but a bride from behind and the array of hands that fuss with her dress, as well as the Tiffany-box blue background and embossed gold lettering fairly pulsate with the damning words chick lit, chick lit. And the wedding-themed cover of TWO OF A KIND says the same. I happen to love both of these covers and feel they convey essential thematic information about the books. In the case of A WEDDING IN GREAT NECK, which is told from several points of view—though not the bride’s—I loved how the bride on the cover was being done to. She was an object, rather than a subject, and the cover subtly suggested that.

In TWO OF A KIND, the man and woman are seated apart, separated by an aisle. He is looking straight ahead; she is looking at him. From their body language we sense the tension between them, postures that mirror what transpires in the novel.

The cover of novel # 6, YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME, was even further along the chick- lit spectrum. The dominant color scheme is pink and white. And it depicts pink, peep-toed pumps covered in white polka dots. These pumps face a pair of shoes made for a baby girl. I loved this cover. It is bold and arresting in its own right, and it really does speak to the book’s essential theme: motherhood as almost a confrontation with a tiny new stranger. But it is also a very gender specific cover; no guy is going to be caught reading that book on the subway —not even my husband!

The chick lit association of these covers also tend to lighten and even cheapen the words inside them. Now let me say something about chick lit here. Despite the fact that women are—and have historically always been—the big consumers of novels, the books designed to appeal to our interests and sensibilities are somehow demoted and tainted with that chick lit brush. It’s a bad brush too: it says your book is unimportant, shallow, trivial and not well written.

I’m sorry to report that my very own indie bookstore, a store with the word community embedded in its name, did not want to carry that novel, despite the fact that I have lived in the neighborhood for more than twenty years. When I expressed my disappointment to the owner of the store, he made it clear that he thought my book had little merit—because of its cover. Had he bothered to read or even look at it, he might have thought otherwise.

The ideal cover is gender neutral—one that either a woman or man would want to pick up. (Many women avoid books with high heels, birthday cakes and back views of female figures standing by the ocean or a lake too.) But most writers do not get a say in their covers. And even when they do, they still need to be attentive to the market place.

My books are going to appeal to women, and so the covers should be appealing to them as well. If there are times the cover seems to make light of what is inside, so be it. I know that the words themselves are the best and truest expression of what I think, observe, believe, and feel. And I only hope readers will find their way to these words, no matter what covers contain them.

* A version of this post also appeared on womensfictionwriters.com

About Yona Zeldis McDonough

Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels; her seventh, The House on Primrose Pond, will be out from New American Library in February, 2016. In addition, she is the editor of the essay collections The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty and All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader. Her short fiction, articles and essays have been published in anthologies as well as in numerous national magazines and newspapers. She is also the award-winning author of twenty-six books for children, including the highly acclaimed chapter books, The Doll Shop Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Yona lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, two children and two noisy Pomeranians.

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About THE HOUSE ON PRIMROSE POND

A compelling novel about one woman’s search for the truth from the author of YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME.

After suffering a sudden, traumatic loss, historical novelist Susannah Gilmore decides to uproot her life—and the lives of her two children—and leave their beloved Brooklyn for the little town of Eastwood, New Hampshire.

While the trio adjusts to their new surroundings, Susannah is captivated by an unexpected find in her late parents’ home: an unsigned love note addressed to her mother, in handwriting that is most definitely not her father’s.

Reeling from the thought that she never really knew her mother, Susannah finds mysteries everywhere she looks: in her daughter’s friendship with an older neighbor, in a charismatic local man to whom she’s powerfully drawn, and in an eighteenth century crime she’s researching for her next book. Compelled to dig into her mother’s past, Susannah discovers even more secrets, ones that surpass any fiction she could ever put to paper...