{"id":1252,"date":"2015-07-02T22:09:54","date_gmt":"2015-07-02T22:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arielsheen.com\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2015-07-02T22:09:54","modified_gmt":"2015-07-02T22:09:54","slug":"on-the-difficulty-of-choosing-a-proper-cover-for-unraveling-book-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/2015\/07\/02\/on-the-difficulty-of-choosing-a-proper-cover-for-unraveling-book-1\/","title":{"rendered":"On Choosing a Proper Cover for Unraveling: Book 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought that coming up with a book cover for Unraveling would be easy, but it’s turned into a\u00a0project. My first idea was to look for a stock photo that captured enough of the elements of one of the scenes in the chapter and then to slap some text over it with the title and my name. I searched through ShutterStock<\/a> for a good several hours using terms that were appropriate for Jesse’s chapter. Teenagers. Drug Abuse. Gangs. Addiction. Recovery. Secrets. Espionage. Isolation. etc. The amount of images that I went through was, well, staggering. Finally, I alighted upon this image!<\/p>\n

\"Stock<\/a>
Stock photo chosen but, as of this posting, unused.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I liked it immediately and purchased it. My thought process in doing so was that though the image doesn’t depict Jesse Oberman, a bright and driven 16 year old boy trying to deal with a number of major changes in his life that he doesn’t fully understand or know how to deal with, the\u00a0image is a pretty damn good physical approximation of Josselyn, a character that Jesse meets in Book 1. The items around her, the gun, mask and money, are also components of their relations so it seems appropriate. Lastly, who wouldn’t be intrigued enough into making a small purchase of a serial novel\u00a0by a pretty woman with these items around them.<\/p>\n

\"Cracked
Cracked Font<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From here I then decided to use the Cracked font for the author attribution and title, then\u00a0Age of Unraveling.\u00a0<\/em>I chose the Cracked font as a means of highlighting the social\/political\/economic disintegration prevalent within the plot. I’d previously\u00a0chosen Unraveling<\/em>\u00a0as a title,\u00a0again referring to the themes of the book, but had added Age of<\/em>\u00a0to it\u00a0as a nod to British Historian\u00a0Eric Hobsbawm<\/a>. Whereas Hobsbawm wrote with insightful and compelling mastery about the upheavals over 202 years at a high level of abstraction, Unraveling is set over a\u00a0two year period at\u00a0a very low\u00a0level of abstraction wherein characters deal with this historical inheritance. To make the name stand out I made the text black with a red drop shadow. Happy that the picture related if not to Jesse than at least a character he meets in Book 1 and confident that the text alluded to a breaking down of social order I shared this on my Facebook and asked for input.<\/p>\n

The response that I got from my friends upon sharing my work\u00a0was unanimous and\u00a0disheartening. Time and money spent on that cover were, in their view, a waste. The image was “cheesy” and the text looked awful. Trusting of my friends\u00a0input I\u00a0decided to scrap it for a new one. I would not have to do so alone, however, as my brother Jaz<\/a> said he would help me.\u00a0He forwarded me a couple of test images, shown\u00a0below,\u00a0so that I could help guide him as to what I want.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2285\"<\/a>
One of the concept designs for the cover.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"IMG_3940\"<\/a>
Another concept design for the cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I like both of these a lot. Here’s why:<\/p>\n

I like the one on the right as it shows a youth, presumably\u00a0Jesse, in an out of focus manner, hinting at the internal conflict he is going through while interacting with an\u00a0external world that he wants to mold to his will. The one on the right, however, I can’t use (or can I?) as it is\u00a0the same stock photo used by the musician James Blake on his album James Blake<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A more appropriate textual rendition of the title.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I like the one on the left as it hints at\u00a0the accelerating chaos from the unexpected confluence of\u00a0a number of people\/events.\u00a0Because of this I feel that the lack of a human beings on it\u00a0not to be so big an issue.<\/p>\n

Given that one of the uncommented-upon-by-the-characters conflicts within the book is between Hegelian <\/a>and Nietzschean<\/a> conceptions of time, history, law and agency I find myself drawn to a typography\u00a0that looks like this True Detective<\/a> poster from season 1.<\/p>\n

After I informed Jaz of the the right cover imaged was used by James Blake, he produced the one below as a well as another one with the title text more distorted which I prefer but don’t have a copy of. In this cover iteration we also decided to include a one line\u00a0thematic description of Book 1: “His life is falling apart and he’s taking everyone with him.”<\/p>\n

\"Like<\/a>
Another\u00a0concept for the cover based on the above right one being used on James Blake’s self-titled album.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He also encouraged me to\u00a0look over other covers\u00a0at\u00a0Designspiration<\/a>, which is a great resource for ideation of covers.\u00a0There were many that I liked there as well as on the website for\u00a0Face Out Books<\/a>. I was especially drawn to the aesthetics relying upon the placement of multiple covers as there will be several\u00a0more books in the series. There were so many choices that I felt overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

Lastly I decided to do a little digging onto cover ideas on my own. I’m not extensively well\u00a0read when it comes to\u00a0pulp\/noir novels, but\u00a0as I’ve always found myself intrigued by the aesthetics of pulp covers and as it was in part a response to my enjoyment of reading the major works of novelists\u00a0Dashiell Hammett<\/a>\u00a0and Raymond Chandler<\/a>\u00a0which made me include\u00a0elements of classic noir fiction (though with\u00a0a much more\u00a0progressive worldview) into Unraveling\u00a0– I also decided to look through Pulp Curry<\/a>. \u00a0Some of the pulp covers\u00a0that I liked are below, though given the\u00a0number of\u00a0modern stylistic and narrative elements in it as well as the expenses in producing these original drawings this seems to be a dead end.<\/p>\n

\"mcginnis\"<\/a>
Book cover of a book of book covers. How meta!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"2014-09-23-pulp-covers-maguire-04\"<\/a>
Not sure if this was a book cover, but I like the image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"7775165196_133d5a5e7c_h\"<\/a>
Male gaze in full effect here and in every other pulp novel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"noir-art-ernest-chiriaka-jealous-paul-daniels-via-pulpart-tumblr\"<\/a>
Irony: In Unraveling the women trap the men.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I\u00a0think that the pulp covers would work for some of the female characters books, but not for Jesse. I think it’d be double interesting as most of the females break from being the typical passive object that they are in these types of works and are heroes fighting a toxic form of masculinity and making up for the failings of their male comrades. I don’t want to go to much into this so that you’ll want to see what I mean by reading subsequent books, but did want to point out the irony that would occur if such a d\u00e9tournement<\/a> was ever made.<\/p>\n

All this said, as of\u00a0now\u00a0I’ve decided on the following post. I\u00a0like the oldness of the map – which relates to the repetition of patterns in this area of the world. I’d like to change the font to something more stylized – but I plan on doing this after the publication of the third part of the book as then I plan on getting physical copies\u00a0published and making them available for sale.<\/p>\n

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I thought that coming up with a book cover for Unraveling would be easy, but it’s turned into a\u00a0project. My first idea was to look for a stock photo that captured enough of the elements of one of the scenes in the chapter and then to slap some text over it with the title and … Continue reading “On Choosing a Proper Cover for Unraveling: Book 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[86,1,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-process","category-uncategorized","category-unraveling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8e7kf-kc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}