Fugly Covers on Friday
May 16th, 2008 by Vanessa
We’ve deliberated long and hard about our first choices for Fugly Friday. After all, there’s the horrors that are Geri Halliwell’s Ugenia Lavender books (look left, aren’t they horrid? Not as bad as the Rainbow Fairies though), but I think the main objection to those is the (possibly) ghost-written pap within them, not just the covers. The point of Fugly Fridays is to show what makes a truly awful cover – because, all together now people: “you can’t judge a book by its cover but you sure as hell can sell it by its cover” – and to point out some of the really good covers around.
So, our inaugural, Fugly Cover of the week is The Chaos Quest by Gill Arbuthnott over there on the right. I can’t decide what I hate most; the retina-burning stripse, the nasty font for the title, the strange image of an amorphous blob flying across the middle – certainly nothing in the blurb on the back indicates what that might be. It doesn’t do the book justice. Gill Arbuthnott is a very talented writer but try as I might, I can’t sell this book.
Her third book, Winterbringers, is also excellent and has a great cover; interesting, intriguing, attractive, related to the story and I hand sell lots of copies. See how lovely it is. Children read this, they come back to tell me how good it was and won’t read the other two because there’s also The Chaos Clock - also brilliant but also with a minging cover.
Another Fugly Cover next week but do continue to send us your nominations and publishers, do remember that we are trying to be constructive. Mostly. But if you give a book the hindrance of a lousy cover then you’re condemning it to a life bereft of a face out position, never to be placed on the centre table, never allowed near a window display, never to be included in a catalogue unless you actually pay cold hard cash to a bookshop to do that. Surely your books deserve better than that?
WInterbringers is lovely, but I do entirely see what you mean about the other one.
What you ought to do is have a supply of brown paper covers to put over the horrors- maybe it might intrigue people into reading them.
Suitably fugly, Vanessa, and a wince-making start to your feature. I fear I must disqualify myself from contributing in case it should look like professional back-stabbing. I can enjoy the bloody spectacle from the sidelines, however…
Oh dear. Poor old Chaos Quest. It’s not pretty, is it. No, really not pretty. My eyes hurt a bit even seconds after looking at it. That blob looks like a flying lump of phlegm or, err, something else. Possibly emitted from the nose of an inter-galactic beastie. Sorry, have I said too much? I’ll stop there. Still, I could imagine my husband wouldn’t be deterred by a cover like that. Not to be sexist, but one for the boys perhaps? No, not even for the boys. Not from what you say.
I can’t put up an image but the reissue of my own Candle in the Dark (A and C Black) not only bids fair to be the ugliest cover in the world but is also WRONG AND INACCURATE about a historical event. I did object at the time most strongly but was told “Oh, everyone here thinks it’s lovely!” Nuff said, eh? It was too late to do anything about it, but check it out on amazon.