Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Book Cover Designs Guest Blog - ARK by Jesse Miller



Greetings!  My name is Jesse Miller and I am the author of two novels, both available from Common Deer Press.  If you’re like me, you’ve been nearly bludgeoned to death by the old adage to avoid judging a book by its cover.  However, it’s pretty hard not to—it’s the first thing that catches our eye and it makes an impression long before we dip into the actual-factual content of the book.  This is to say, much like an album (back when albums were regarded as an important unit of art!), the cover transmits something artistically important (and immediately) to a reader.  The cover matters, and it most certainly matters to the writer as well. 

Today then, I’d like to share what could be thought of as concept art—sketches, iterations—in the evolution of the book art for my two novels.

I’d like to present EXHIBIT A!  This is the first idea I had for my novel Unwrap Your Candy.  For this to make sense, a little about the book from our fine friends at the publicity department at Common Deer Press:

Thom’s life has a soundtrack. Unseen glass phalluses—thousands of them—whirring softly along conveyer belts on the other side of the factory wall. The snap and splash of eggs against plaster. The scratch-fizz-tang of cigarette lighters being flipped again and again. A thousand throats swallowing a thousand swigs of beer; a thousand sets of lungs choking on a thousand French inhales. Hard fists sinking into soft flesh; soft chunks dropping onto hard sidewalks. Plop-flush-drain repeat. And moonsong, high above, forever calling and calling, “Stud, rub 'er with the Stud Rubber.” If only it were so simple.

Got it?  Our protag Thom works in a condom factory and boy howdy does it drive him to snap!  Now, check out the original idea I had for the cover. Notice the condom there front-and-center—I was thinking, like, it needs to be a bunch of condoms from a box, connected; and notice the lettering of the brand kind of melting into the presentation of the title and the author of the novel (that’s me!):







And then check out the full cover, jacket I think is the term—it had to be a dance party of sorts, the movement of the language of the book, and I was thinking, well, I was thinking this needs to just get buckwild, so I want phalluses parading around is the thing, which is…uh…quite something to behold:




Ellie, the undisputed book art champion of the world, came back with this breathtaking cover below.  I mean, it makes my pupils dilate and gives me the same kind of feeling as the chromatic trinity of a White Stripes album cover. Check it:








Next, the full wrapper.  Whatever cool new saying is synonymous with “mic drop,” please apply that here:





Ok, now for the book I’m currently promoting.  Like UYC, it’s important to have a little sense of the book’s content before we, I guess, judge the cover by the book??  So, here is more fine work from the publicity department at Common Deer Press about my current novel ARK:

Imagine the son of Cinderella and Noah. That's Alabaster Ash, professional window washer and amateur foot fetishist, thrall to his three physically fit, brutally aggressive stepsisters. After polishing foot after foot of glass in the gingerbread city of Candyland and cleaning up after the “wicked stairmasters,” he haunts the bars and streets looking for love and appreciation–or a really nice pair of feet. Like it or not, Alabaster finds himself reliving and reimagining his parents' lives as he roams from bar to bar, from thrill ride to stunt show in the linguistic funland that is ARK.


As I was working on ARK, I kept imagining two covers, and at some point when I finally found a publisher, I presented each idea for approval.  Idea one had a decidedly conceptual rock album feel:





While idea one captures the big-ticket artifacts from the stories shaping my novel, idea two  distills the soul of the story a bit more I think, and there’s a playfulness, a punning—the no signal blackout tv screen concept.  It gets at the hope-inspiring rainbow from old Noah, but it fractures and reassembles it within the framework of a blackout drunk befitting our bumbling protagonist Alabaster:






Now for a wrinkle: Like so many starter marriages these days, ARK was involved with a prior publisher, and this was the cover for the first release.  I loved it when it came out, and even though I lost my mind and went catatonic for a while after the original publisher folded, I still have a great fondness for this ALL CAPS! bold cover:




Thankfully, after the release of UYC, the fine people at Common Deer Press took an interest in ARK.  And now the book lives on, maybe even reaching a wider and more interested audience (YOU could BE that audience!!)  And I have come to think of the new cover as just about the most astoundingly perfect artwork for the book—this is a fully realized form, Jack.  Most things are really, truly terrible, but this fills me with what I can only describe as pure joy.  I love you Common Deer Press, and I’m so very freaking thrilled to share the artwork for my sorta-kinda-new novel:




Goddamn, that’s beautiful.  And then the full wrap:





And now for you!  You like things, I’m sure of it!  So, all of this casting back in time and deep meditation on artwork has me thinking about some of my favorite iconic art from other (more famous) literary works.  So, what’s your favorite book cover and why?





ARK
Jesse Miller

Genre: Literary Fiction

Publisher: Common Deer Press

Date of Publication: May 15, 2018

ISBN: Hardcover ISBN: 978-988761-08-4
Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-988761-07-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-988761-09-1

Number of pages: 162
Word Count: 45k

Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila

Book Description:

Imagine the son of Cinderella and Noah. That's Alabaster Ash, professional window washer and amateur foot fetishist, thrall to his three physically fit, brutally aggressive stepsisters.

After polishing foot after foot of glass in the gingerbread city of Candyland and cleaning up after the “wicked stairmasters,” he haunts the bars and streets looking for love and appreciation -or a really nice pair of feet.

Like it or not, Alabaster finds himself reliving and reimagining his parents' lives as he roams from bar to bar, from thrill ride to stunt show in the linguistic funland that is ARK.

Excerpt:

Ground squirmed past the windows, shuffling racks of bones and skulls under the soptoil as clouds crept along the horizon. On the bus, all the windows let in cold air and hung like a racked row of ice cubes in a tray, but I barely cracked the bottle.
Out I poured when the doors opened, unable to feel my legs, unable to see the ocean, but I could smell the salty marsh marching wet blue harridans, swiping and batting the spit, pushing the blood and saltboxing up fatjuices into my sinuses.

Jammed a kwata in the belly box and engaged the line.

–Hello?
–I’ve arrived. I’m here.
–That’s great. I bet a little walk will feel like a little slice of heaven, eh?
–I suppose.
–Well, I’ll leave the light on for you, Buddy.

I slid on my gloves and tried not to flinch at the sudden mustering of prickly discs skipping to my face. I leaned in hard and clacked through town, blackened and boarded and unblinking, barely wicklit. Smatter rooms to let. Ingrown hairs. Offseason. Unseasoned in the savorless in and out drag of the tonguetide. I dashed through a carless parking lot and into an astralamped glass meadow jotting down quivering blue starlight ink- puddles into suckshifts of snowhunchbanks humpbacking the outermost stretch of tideland. To the left, a skit of cloven unguals stirred it seemed, crunchy, but I only got half an ear worth and couldn’t noctoscop the goings-on of could be caribou or elk or deer bowing their head, bowing their head before the almighty peering down hard and in, like the retractable Polton and Crane lamp in the dentist’s office that hangs my mouth open.
Inside the blackness, the stickiting, ricketing pickets of thickets wiggle on their dicot studs without me seeing, while they shot out the other side and stitched a black curtain against the edge of the rest of the world. I clacked another mile stretch as brine wafers tickled my ears and swizzled my nos- trils while Lawrence Welk drift popping jollyjawdropping orbs uncorked across my field of vichy.
Estrella’s was a lighthouse, though not the vertical variety. But it glowed.
Light hung out over the glass and flabbed fat, hotwhite dough out the sides as I took up her street. This was another gingerbread house, hundreds of miles from home, though this one in earshot of the beach. I rang and rang and rang and then just opened the door.

About the Author:

Jesse Miller is the author of Unwrap Your Candy and the forthcoming ARK, both available from Common Deer Press. He is a Visiting Assistant Lecturer in English at the University of New England.  He lives in the great city of Portland, Maine with his wife, two cats, and dog. Jesse roots for the Red Sox.



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1 comment:

Onyinye Elochukwu said...

Sounds interesting and intriguing.

 
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