In today’s attention economy, authors and publishers are competing not only with each other, but also with the many distractions of life 一 from streaming platforms to social feeds. Book covers have long played a vital role in driving sales by appealing to the book’s target audience. Yet now more than ever, they’re an author and publisher’s best chance to compel people to stop what they’re doing and find out more about their book. The question is how to create a cover that will achieve this ..read more

The original title for Dorothy Parker in Hollywood was Out There.  Out There came to me a full 12 months ago through John Vairo, a real gem of a guy and an Associate Art Director at Gallery Books (S&S). With a title like ‘Out There’ for a book about the incredible Dorothy Parker, the original vision for this jacket was colorful and a bit wild. John envisioned a classic portrait of Dorothy that was enhanced with “Jean Cocteau-inspired drawings.” When I looked up Jean Cocteau, I immediately thought of the branding for British DJs Disclosure. Rad ..read more

I’ve come across quite a few wonderful reissues during my recent internet travels so I thought I’d gather them all in one place so we can marvel at them together. Enjoy ..read more

Denis Izotov is a graphic designer from Moscow. He specializes in packaging and print design. For a long time, Denis worked at a record label where he collaborated with several well-known bands in Russia. He is currently a senior designer at Alpina Publishing Group. He can be found on Instagram @deni_izotov. Here he takes us through a year-long labour of love - redesigning the works of his favourite author, Eduard Limonov. I was thrilled. The publishing house where I work was going to reissue my favourite author. I immediately started brainstorming cover ideas, even before the new edition was ..read more

On August 13th 2024 Dzanc Books will publish Lindsey Drager’s fourth experimental novel, The Avian Hourglass. Here is a description of the book, taken from the publisher’s website: At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager’s signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley Jackson The birds have disappeared. The stars are no longer visible. The Crisis is growing worse. In a town as isolated as a snowglobe, a ..read more

Last night (Thursday 7th March) saw the convergence of Britain’s best and brightest book cover designers at Gigi’s in Hoxton for the 11th Annual Academy of British Cover Design awards. It was the first time being held in the bar upstairs and I think we were all grateful for the increase in space and the improved ventilation :) Regular compere Jack Smyth was sadly unable to attend but the wonderful Nico Taylor did a brilliant job of hosting (and enforcing the house rule of ‘shut the f**k up’).   Compere Nico Taylor   And without further ado, here are the winners! Young Adult: JAMES ..read more

Eric C. Wilder is a freelance designer living in Upstate New York. Here he takes us through his process for creating three covers for Open Letter Book’s Translator Triptych series. I have previous experience as a packaging designer, so when I get a series like this I tend to look at it as though I’m developing a product line. That is to say, instead of developing three covers for three separate stories, I develop an overarching visual look, and then tailor that look to each individual story. It’s almost like creating a visual language, and then using that language to express three distinct ide ..read more

Beci Kelly is a London-based Illustrator/Designer, currently working as Head of Design, Doubleday at Penguin Random House - Transworld. Here she takes us through her process for designing the stunning cover of Bea Setton’s Berlin. This novel is centred around Daphne, a young and confused 20-something who has just moved to Berlin, seemingly in search of herself, but we never really know if we can trust her accounts of her life or what’s happening around her. Even her thoughts are rather distorted and almost dreamlike. It felt important to focus on Daphne and not the urban city itself, as with a ..read more

Jennifer Heuer is a book cover designer, illustrator, and art director for Penguin Random House. She’s worked out of the Pencil Factory in Brooklyn NY for 10 years. Here she takes us through her fascinating process for designing Island City. In Laura Adamczyk’s novel Island City, we meet a nameless wry and wistful woman who has basically given up. She sells all her belongings and moves back to her hometown which she claims it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She parks herself in a dark local bar and begins to tell her stories to the indifferent regulars around the bar. We only hear her v ..read more

MIT Press’s forthcoming book Voidopolis is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Written to reflect the author’s experience of COVID as the physical city emptied of people and activities, the book is printed with missing words and incomplete images. It is illegible in the printed form and readers must use an augmented reality app to read in full. However the app is designed to degrade over time — revealing less and less before renewing itself on an annual basis ..read more