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05/11/2004 Archived Entry: "Cover art for the book is in"

I RECEIVED COVER ART FOR THE NEW BOOK YESTERDAY. Well, just the black-and-white line art, via fax. Don't know anything about the colors yet. But it's very cool. It was drawn by the 1960s underground comix artist Bob Crabb [NOTE 5/18/04: Actually Bob got started in 1979, I learned later. The 60s impression must have just been from all those drugs I took back then. Or was it all the drugs he took back then?). It features a scrumptously swashbuckling Outlaw (think Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean crossed with Errol Flynn in anything). Publishers consider both book titles and book covers to be part of their marketing domain, and they sometimes don't even show them to the writers before publication, believe it or not. Oh, I'm sure Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele have some contractual arrangement about that, but sometimes us little folk have to wait in suspense to learn what our publishers did to us. Loompanics goes out of its way to be nice. (And even when they've changed my proposed titles, theirs have always been better.)

There's always a moment of shock seeing a new cover design: Oh no! That's not what I envisioned! But within minutes, the designs grow on me. The only one that ever bothered me even slightly was the cover for 101 Things, because it showed a pistol on a table pointing at the people in the illustration. I figured my gun friends would never let me live that down -- though in fact only one ever mentioned it. This new cover for The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook is a charmer. I'll run off to the woods and join that Outlaw's band of Merry Persons any time.

Posted by Claire @ 08:51 AM CST
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