I've always been curious
>about publisher decisions and cover
>styles, etc over the years.
>
>About the last decade prior to LL's
>passing, Bantam had settled on a very
>iconic moniker style for his books that
>was very distinctive branding they used
>everywhere. It appeared on only one
>hardcover that I can recall, THE OUTLAWS
>OF MESQUITE, and after LL's passing it
>seemed like it was abandoned entirely.
>I've always thought this to be a rather
>strange considering how seemingly
>successful it was. What was the decision
>making to jettison this? This is a HUGELY complicated subject that I'll try to make some sense out of. to do so I need to define just what we are talking about. The original edition of Outlaws of Mesquite was what is called a "full bleed" cover, meaning that the edges of the art stretched off the page, no borders. The lettering had the "points" in the middle of the vertical lines to give it an "old west" feeling and the art was, I believe, by Steve Assel. The art was slightly photo realistic. It was done by starting with a shot of a costumed model in a studio. This is often projected onto the canvass and sketched in. Then a background was sketched in often sourced from other photographic reference.
Remember all that. It will be important when I get to the "How?" part of the question. First, I'm going to deal with "Why?"
Sometimes with an old brand, a legacy back list brand, like ours the conversation about changing the covers goes like this: The booksellers (book stores) complain that the brand is getting stale. This really doesn't happen often when you have a living writer creating new books, but it does sometimes. But when the brand is stable for too long the bookstores start to wonder if they could be doing something better with the space that the writer takes up on the shelves. They like to see something new and fresh. New books might do it but they also wonder if new covers might sell more books. They express this lack of confidence with the publisher.
Once that reaches a critical mass, realize that changing covers is expensive, the publisher decides to freshen things up. Often they know it actually won't help sales much, especially if they don't radically change the cover design to appeal to a completely new audience, but sometimes they do it to stop the complaints from the booksellers and because if something was to go wrong and it was discovered they ignored the booksellers for too long their job might be in jeopardy because someone might decide they had made the wrong decision.
So then they change the design ... and if they change it intelligently they will attract new readers, if they don't it probably won't really hurt sales UNLESS they come up with covers so bad people don't want to be seen in public reading the books. This does happen but it is less likely these days.
The first point is that sometimes it's all a bit less scientific than you might think. In the case of Dad's covers the above mentioned part of the agenda has occasionally had some impact but more specific to the cover you are asking about here's some of what happened. It was 30 years ago so my memory may be imperfect.
In the 1980s and 1990s we were using a number of artists, Assel being one of the better ones, who used the "photo shoot with a model and then project onto the canvass" technique. The process contained a couple of inherent problems.
1) Often the artists were either rushed, inattentive, or not all that great at drawing/painting without photo reference (I would constantly seen spots where the artist had poorly drawn in areas where the photo was not clear). The result of this was that the cover painting was both photographically accurate and also INaccurate at the same time. Basically, it's not the best way to do art but it is common in the advertising business, nonetheless.
2) The character, who was photographed in the studio, isn't really "connected" to the background. For a long time the rule seemed to be a cowboy guy showing off his gun standing in front of a XXXXXXX. Fill in the blank.
3) Because it was based on a photo there was often a sense of photo realistic "frozen action" instead of the sense of motion you get from an artist who truly uses paint and isn't afraid to let it look like a painting ... the artistic imprecision of paint allows the art to feel like it's in motion rather than frozen like a photo.
Now, if you go back to Dad's covers from the 1960s and early '70s you see a lot of work by guys who could really PAINT. They might use models (I don't know) but they didn't project they onto the canvass and you rarely got that frozen action feeling. On top of that nearly every detail was either beautifully rendered or the paint was used to SUGGEST detail in a way where your mind fills in the missing bits ... if the art looks like it had a photo as a source your brain won't do that. Think of the classic Catlow cover with the three riders. Beautiful!
In the 1990s we started preparing for a special promotion for The Sackett Series. I had been using a terrific artist at the Louis L'Amour Western magazine and for a few audio covers named Greg Manchess who could paint without using the projection technique and could emulate the style of the classic illustrators like NC Wyeth and Frank Schoonover. We chose him to do the Sackett covers and many of the small hardback short story collections we were doing at them time. To set them apart we used a border or frame on both types of book.
Eventually, that call for a freshening of the line started with the booksellers and we carried over the "framed art" look onto all the books to make everyone happy. The full bleed art that ran to the edges of the cover was no more.
Now, given our reprinting schedule in those days it took 7 years to recover the entire line moving at top speed, which we did not do. Eventually, a new administration came in and they started getting that "we're tired of the old look" feedback from the bookstores (you get this any time they wish sales would pick up).
The new administration wanted to change something and I objected, we were just about to finally finish the look that we had started years before. They suggested we make an incremental change so they could say to the book store reps that they had done "something." I didn't like that idea, I felt that if we had to make a change (which I didn't want to do) it should be something different enough so that it picked up customers who didn't like the old illustrated covers. This was when they decided to do the (not painted) covers that were based on photographs you've seen over the last decade. I warned them that it was going to be hard to do something like 130 of them. When working with photos you can only do things that you can get photos of, when using paintings the only limit to what you can do is your imagination.
Eventually, guess what, the booksellers mentioned a freshening up yet again and I took the opportunity to convert back to the frame or border around a classic looking illustration. I hope it stops now.
A few last things: The Outlaws of Mesquite look was not more successful than other cover treatments. It was a look that dated from the 1980s and, in reality, our best across the board sales were probably in the 1990s.
The Fonts picked for the title and author's name have changed to work with the rest of the cover treatment. At some point we retired the super westerny font with the points in the middle of the vertical lines because not all of our stuff was western and it was kind of fat which created a few problems with books with longer titles. This history of covers has been a bit compressed, there are more issues details but it covers the important ground.
As you can tell, much of this cover business has to do with other elements of the book business rather than what the writer, estate, or reader are interested in. It's important to remember that publishers have only recently begun to think of readers as "their customers" before a few years ago (and still to a great extent) their customers are the booksellers.
My favorite era for book covers is roughly the late 1950 through the early 1970s time period. GREAT ART done by Great Artists. Bama. McGinnis. Frazetta. Desoto. McGuire. McCarthy. Jones. Full bleed covers were MUCH easier to design a cover for. You could get 3 or 4 ideas into a full bleed paperback cover. The smaller piece of art inside the border, like we currently use, is good for 1 or 2.
