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11:43 PM PST, March 4, 2008
So Harper Collins' initial favourite was #3, and they asked Dave if he could come in closer and make The Graveyard Book title part of the type of the gravestone...
He did a sketch of what they were asking for, but he wasn't keen on it, and neither, when they saw it, was anyone else, not really.
Here's an example of the kind of typeface Dave's planning to create for the cover, taking all the letters from real local gravestones.
This was Dave's favourite. He said, "MY FAVOURITE. the toddler walks along the knife edge, which has the graveyard reflected inside it. I think this one does everything and now I've read the whole book, sums up the plot, and the balance between the real world and the ghost world best".
And he's right, but Harpers felt it might be too strong and might put off some potential young readers (or at least their teachers/parents), but everyone also loved it... so we're going to use it for the Subterranean Press edition of The Graveyard Book, and probably on the Bloomsbury limited edition version as well. It'll be on versions of the book intended only for adults.
So this one, below -- which may or may not be your favourite -- is the one that, after a lot of soul-searching and back and forthing, we went for. Dave describes it as, "A worn grave in the negative shape of Bods profile, mist winds through the grave."
I confess that I lobbied for it, but was an easy cover to lobby for, mostly because it's iconic and very simple. It's an image we could use on lots of things -- something that can be a visual shorthand for the book. It would be appropriate as the cover of a book for kids or for teens or for adults. And when your hero is a boy named Nobody... well, it's kind of fitting on a number of different levels.
(I'm hoping that some of the other sketches may wind up as illustrations. I'd love to see yesterday's #6 as a frontispiece, for example. We'll see -- it's all up to Dave.)
So Dave will be painting both of them, yesterday's #2 and #5. I know how far things go from the sketch to the painting, and can't wait to be able to post one or both of the finished covers up here.
3:49 PM PST, March 4, 2008
Lots of people wrote to tell me that X-Rays were needed for TB tests, and some people suggested that they were in hand-baggage as they might be fogged by X-Rays in checked baggage, but no-one explained why there seemed no mechanism for anyone ever to look at the (quite expensive, and carried over in hand-baggage), x-rays until this arrived from Mr Petit...
Having been a commanding officer in the UK -- meaning I had to supervise
airmen and NCOs under my command when they wanted to bring their UK brides
back to the US -- I had to chuckle when I saw the note about the x-ray.
It's not required by the immigration folks (either Division 6, or anyone
else). Since it's a different federal agency, I'm not surprised that an INS
employee wouldn't know about it. It's required by the US Public Health
Service, for everyone, regardless of nationality, who is trying to immigrate.
And they do, on occasion, get checked, but only if there's advance reason to
believe there's "a substantial risk of exposure." For example, you can bet
that flights on foreign-flag carriers originating in, say, Nairobi get more
scrutiny than would a BA or AA flight from Heathrow.
The relevant statute was passed in 1938 (there may have been a predecessor,
but I doubt it) and hasn't been updated yet. What a surprise.
And this came in from my editor Jennifer Brehl at Harper Collins about the free American Gods -- I'm putting it up because she says it better than I could paraphrase it:
First of all, the online edition has been optimized and the embedded pages are moving much faster. I’ve asked that the widget confusion be fixed – i.e., open up widget to full book rather than older partial version.
We’re wondering if you might have some time tomorrow that we could call you and we could have a conference call to discuss things? We want your fans to know that we are responsive to their concerns and, although it’s painful getting the criticism, it’s also a good learning opportunity.So there will be a conference call, and I'll report back on it.
...
-Mike
Oh good.
(And I should mention, I loved this Michael Chabon New Yorker article about Superhero costumes.)
Hello Neil,
I am going to the Easter Con in Heathrow because I'd like to hear you. Could you recommend which day would have the most Neil-time or most Neil-events? I know I'm not made of the right stuff since I might have to be selective about the days at the con, and even though I'd love to build my own battle-ready space ship, I still would like to get two flies with one swat....being battle-ready an'all (Ahem!).
Thank you,
Henriette
From the schedule, it looks like it's definitely Sunday.
http://www.orbital2008.org/sunday.pdf
-- and you get a Mitch Benn concert into the bargain.
...
Dave McKean says he doesn't mind me putting up his sketches for The Graveyard Book cover...
So to bring you up to speed...
Dave did a cover while I was writing the book. As the book continued, it became sort of obvious that the cover was younger than the book was, and we needed a cover that told adults that this was a book for them too.
So I finished the book and Dave read the book and did a bunch of sketches, all of which made me happy, and all of which felt a lot more like the book I'd written...
All of these are sketches, it's worth pointing out -- roughs for me and the various editors and art departments to look at and choose from. It's not finished art, nor is it meant to be.
(The actual typeface is something Dave plans to scan in and create from photos of old gravestones.)
And in the next post I'll tell you what the response was, and which one we wound up going with and why.
12:46 AM PST, March 4, 2008
Lots of lovely letters from people about where and how they found authors for free whose work they then went on to buy, although I was vaguely hoping someone would write a letter saying, "If you're so fond of Free, then why don't you write a book for free, that you don't get any royalties on, that could be given away or sold incredibly cheaply, just to encourage people to read? Yeah, what about that then, smartarse?" But nobody has.
Which is actually a pity, because if they did I could point out that I did just that -- the writing the book bit anyway -- last year. It's a short book called Odd and the Frost Giants, and it's published by Bloomsbury Books in the UK and Ireland for the 2008 World Book Day, which is this coming Thursday, the 6th of March. And I wasn't the only one.
"13 million school children in the UK will receive a World Book Day Ģ1 Book
Token which can be exchanged for a World Book Day Ģ1 Book, throughout March,
from over 3,000 participating bookshops and book retailers across the UK and
Republic of Ireland. The Ģ1 Token can also be put towards any book or
audio book costing Ģ2.99 or more. The World Book Day Ģ1 Book Token is sponsored
by National Book Tokens and redemptions are funded by bookshops across the
country."
Again, it's books as dandelion seeds, and not all of them are going to find soil. Some of those 13 million kids will destroy their books, some leave them behind, some not even care enough to participate. But some of the kids will go and choose a book of their own, find something they wouldn't have discovered otherwise, maybe find out that reading and owning books of your own is something you can do for pleasure, and... maybe... it'll help ensure that there are still readers of books -- and bookshops -- a hundred years from now. (I just googled to see if there were any reviews of Odd yet. None from newspapers that I could see, but ... Lots of people wrote to tell me that the chest X-Ray was needed for the Tuberculosis test. Nobody explained why the chest X-Ray has to be carried to the US in hand-baggage (it's one of the rules, or it was in 1992). I asked at immigration when I arrived in the US if anyone was going to look at it, and was told that no, nobody ever ever looked at the chest X-rays in hand-baggage. Ever? Ever, said the man. ... If your dog suddenly discovers and goes for a cat (no longer in a tree) when you're standing on a sheet of what was ice-melt that has just refrozen into sheet ice, and you make a sudden and ill-advised move in an attempt to stop the cat being chased (and to stop the dog losing an eye -- Princess takes her fights seriously) and go down rather heavily on your ankle, you wind up oddly happy if an hour or so later you're just limping and icing it. It could have been a hundred times worse, as my doctor (who happened to be nearby) pointed out. Princess is back inside the house, Cabal has a scratch under his eye. And Dave McKean sent over nine sketches for nine different covers to The Graveyard Book -- all of them really impressive. I'll find out from him if he minds me putting them up here (once the final one has been decided upon, anyway). It would be interesting to show people how a book cover gets decided on. (I was also thrilled that Dave wrote after finishing it and said he thought it was a much stronger book than Coraline.)
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