New cover for Sean Dixon title
Last year, Canadian author Sean Dixon sold U.K. rights to his The Girls Who Saw Everything to HarperCollins U.K., which re-titled the book The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. The book has just been published there, and you can take a look at the cover in a post on the literary blog That Shakespeherian Rag (maintained by Q&Q contributor Steven W. Beattie).
According to the post, the “stunning” cover design is the work of an illustrator named Becca Thorne, who won a competition held jointly by HarperCollins U.K. and the Saatchi Gallery. Though the cover is indeed a good one, it’s worth pointing out that many design professionals have concerns about contest-created covers, which are nicely explicated on the same page by an anonymous poster. Just scroll down to take a look.
Thanks for the link. I should point out that the “anonymous” poster who expressed concerns about contest-created book covers was C. August Bourré, who maintains his own high-quality literary site, Vestige.org.
A great cover. Who cares whether it came as a result of a contest. I do suspect it’s a way for publishers to cut their cover design costs. C’est la vie. So much fine talent out there. Truth is book design is going the way of music album design–where musicians and their friends or relatives do all the creative. Everybody’s a designer now for good or bad. In this case–good.
But no doubt, for the most part, anybody can now have a go cause the computer has raised the bar on mediocrity.