Talking Covers With John Hornor Jacobs

Covers are an important part of getting a book in to a readers hands. The publishing model is changing and evolving and with more and more technology at the hands of authors it is now easier than ever to get the work out there. As more and more authors are going the route of e-publishing covers are again in the spotlight. Over the last year or so one cover designers name has risen to the top of the conversation, John Hornor Jacobs.

A selection of his cover work can be found here.

Spinetingler is pleased to welcome John Hornor Jacobs to talk about book covers and cover design.

What is your design background?

I’ve worked in advertising for the last fourteen or fifteen years. I started off as an interactive guy – back in the dawn age of the internet – and worked up through the ranks until I became creative director at a film company.

What is your design philosophy?

I’m an inductive designer. When I design a cover for a book, I get an idea in my head – an idea formed through some pie-in-the-sky lusting after incredible photography or artwork. That’s the first part. Then reality sets in and I go to my design library and look over all my assets and realize how far reality is from the idealized art I’d been dreaming about. The design process is a merging of my dreaming of custom art and visualizing what a book cover might look like in the best of all possible worlds and then actually executing it in this one. It’s not really a philosophy.

Some designers will tell you the “form follows function” or “clean and simple” but it’s really just trying to get to know the book, what the author wants, and providing a professional looking cover at a reasonable price. I mean, it ain’t fine art. But, still, it’s IMPORTANT for selling books. So I take it seriously. I feel like I have a good sense of what the authors want, and I try to respect their wishes, because I am an author myself.

What covers have you designed?

I’ve designed beaucoup covers, so listing them is silly. But I think my favorite one I’ve done is either Chris F. Holm’s 8 Pounds or a new cover I’ve been working on for Ed Gorman, David Cranmer and Martin H. Greenberg. It hasn’t been shown to the public yet. Also, I’m quite partial to the Needle 2010 Winter Issue – the one with the muscle car. I like that cover.

How important is a good cover? Is a good cover still important in the e-book age?

Covers are the lure that attracts readers. More importantly, covers are one of the major factors that delineate crap $.99 ebooks from great $.99 ebooks that sell.

So, you’re an author and you’ve decided to release your collection or novel on Kindle not because you want to be Amanda Hocking or John Locke but you want to gain a readership for an upcoming release, right? You’ve worked your ass off on the stories, or the novel – polishing, revising, rewriting. You’ve invested hundreds of hours of work into your novel. And then, you slap together a cover in MS Paint in fifteen minutes – using Times New Roman, after all, it’s what you typed the book in! – and put it out into the world.

I don’t think so.

It’s a sad fact of our culture, but packaging is important. First impressions can never be remade. Your cover is the first impression the potential audience has of your work and it sucks that it has to be a typographic or artistic visual representation of a prose experience, but it does. So, covers are important.

What makes a great cover?

Striking visual combined with aggressive or dynamic typography.

What are some of your favorite covers?

The Steampunk Bible cover – a remix of a classic H.G. Wells cover – is pretty awesome. I love the Hard Case Crime novel covers, the pulpy oil paintings really make the designs work. Along that same line, I think David Cranmer did a great job with his Beat to a Pulp Anthology: Round 1.

I love old SF covers, ones with rocket ships and rayguns. I also love the classic Penguin covers (here’s a Flickr set)

Are you always accepting cover jobs, if so how should folks get in touch with you?

I’m not always accepting cover jobs. I turn away work, actually. I’ve got a dayjob as marketing manager, and a nightjob as a novelist. I’m the creative director at Needle: A Magazine of Noir. I do freelance webdesign and Flash programming. I do animation for broadcast. And more importantly, I’ve got kids. So, my cup runneth over. But I love designing covers and currently I’m charging only $100 a pop. Some folks have tried to negotiate me down from that and when they do, I just tell them I’m not interested. The way people deal with you when agreeing on price is a good indication as to how they’ll deal with you when it comes to design revisions. So, I’ll do a cover – and for cheap – but it has to be somewhat on my terms and since I’m not hard-up for cash if I don’t like something about the project or you annoy me with your request, I’ll decline to do the job.

There was one author – a fairly well known author – who after hearing I charge only $100 per cover, asked how much it would decrease the price if she provided the cover photo. She knew exactly what she wanted, she just needed someone to put it together for her. Surely that must decrease the prices quite a bit, shouldn’t it? I told her I wasn’t interested. If there’s no creative opportunity for me, I won’t do the job because I don’t really need to.

You are a writer as well, tell Spinetingler readers about your upcoming novel.

I have two forthcoming novels. The first, Southern Gods, is due out from Night Shade Books this August (and also in audiobook form from Brilliance Audio). There’s a pretty complete rundown of the book on my blog, plus lots of blurbage. In a nutshell, it’s Southern gothic meets crime noir meets cosmic Lovecraftian horror. Night Shade Books is a fantastic press – they have national distribution, so you should be able to get Southern Gods in most respectable bookstores come August. Failing that, you’ll be able to get it at Amazon, B&N and also in every eBook form known to man.

My second novel, This Dark Earth, will be released July 2012 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. I’m incredibly excited that this book has found such a fantastic home. The folks at Simon & Schuster got my vision – the book is a quirky take on the end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse with a Arkansan point of view – and I couldn’t be happier, really, with the way everything has played out, publishing-wise.

I have a couple other novels complete and one is currently on submission. I’ll be trumpeting its acceptance to the world if and when I ever get it.

Thanks for having me on your site!

Brian Lindenmuth

Brian is the non-fiction editor of Spinetingler magazine and one of the fiction editors of Snubnose Press. In addition to Spinetingler his work has appeared in Crimespree magazine and at BSC Review, Galleycat and the Mulholland Books website. He also heads the Spinetingler Award committee.

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