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TONGUE FIRMLY IN CHEEK
This space is reserved for a guest writer and is intended to stimulate and inform. You may not always agree with the sentiments expressed but in listening to novel and alternative points of view we might open up a space for genuine communication. We aim to raise topics of interest to writers and readers. Our guest writers include mavericks, booksellers and book affecionados; anybody who appreciates art and has a point of view to contribute to the debate on the relationship of death to our everyday life and creative intuitive self.
Check out interesting links
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE WRITERS' AND VISUAL ART SITES?
"Just what, exactly, is Judge a Book by its Cover?
I work in a public library. I see literally thousands of books every week; the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category ...We here at Judge a Book by its cover care for our friends who can't read."
www.judgeabook.blogspot.com
Irreverent and thought-provoking. A cover picture of what is supposedly a mother and daughters' legs hanging over a bridge(?) in close contemplation of life and its mysteries makes our blogger think of a double suicide attempt!
Should We Judge a Book by its Cover?
"THE REAL WORLD RETAILING TAKEAWAY
You can indeed judge a book by its cover.
Your customers are judging you everyday by the cover you present. Your window displays are your front cover. Your greeting when they enter is your front cover. Your phone manners are your front cover. Your website if you have one is your front cover. They all speak volumes about what customers or potential customers can expect their experience to be.
So take a good hard look at your front cover and make sure it's representative of the story you're trying to tell. After all, if you have a great story but your cover doesn't communicate that, then no one is going to pick it up to read anyway."
allbusiness.com/retail
"You Can Judge This Book by Its Cover
Books | Review of: Blink
By MICHAEL SHERMER
January 11, 2005
His title, "Blink," is apt, for we humans have a remarkable - and heretofore unproven - capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.
Mr. Gladwell opens "Blink" (Little, Brown, 304 pages, $25.95) with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forgery. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests."
www.nysun.com/arts
WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FAVOURITE BOOK COVER?
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Vote for which cover you prefer
Click on the cover you prefer and send the email.
If you like you can tell me why you prefer the cover you have choosen.
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Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov
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Once upon a time there was a writer who wrote her first novel. A typical first-time novelist she exhibited a degree of blithe pig-headedness and suffered under the illusion of her own grandeur in the bigger scheme of the annals of literary history. The saga of the covers was the beginning of the loss of innocence. First there was a splendid cover with a rebel hearse that sang to her with thrilling lyrics that implied words close to her novelist's heart like funky, off-beat, eccentric. Then there was the second cover; her publisher's choice because a major bookseller said they preferred it, a cover that sang a very different song to her of gloom and tomb. And really her novel was a comedy not a tragedy so she didn't understand it and said so. But she was after all, she was forced to agree, a first-time novelist and what did a first-time novelist know about marketing a book? So she hardly resisted and the second book cover became the book cover by which her first novel would be marked. Needless to say, the big bookseller decided to leave it off their final list of must-reads.
Oddly enough, now that she's got down to doing that web-site on life, love and death that the universe has been pestering her about she doesn't dislike it any more. It seems to fit the web-site; it even sometimes seems like it was meant to be.
So now when she muses about self-publishing she's not sure which cover would be best and she came up with the idea that it might be an interesting experiment to see what other people thought. So tell us which cover you prefer and why if you like, and if we get enough response we'll show a running counter of the votes.
The whole topic of covers is absorbing. There are those who say that a book cover has no influence on book sales. Judging from the plainness of his book covers this is a philosophy that best-selling author John Irving and his publisher successfully subscribe to. There are others like Haruki Murakami's publishers who have used the book covers to brand him the way one might brand a popular soft drink. His modernist monochrome book covers with the dramatic red bits are instantly recognisable. There is another school of thought that says the phenomenon of choosing a book by its cover is typical of our consumer-orientated advertisement-brain-washed society; yet the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover" has been around forever.
Personally I'm a sucker for a perfectly executed cover that complements the title with impeccable style. My current favourite is the book cover of SWIMMING IN A SEA OF DEATH (See Recommended Books on the BOOKS page) bought at The Book Lounge in Cape Town some weeks ago. It simply stood out like a lighthouse in a sea of heaving fiction, making me a splendid promise as it called me to its shores. I was not disappointed.
Consuelo Roland
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