How the worst book cover in history helped kill my writing career

That excellent blogger Laurie Graham recently wrote a post entitled “Hat Tip to Bulgaria” which began “I have a long history of heartbreaking book covers”. You and me both, Laurie! I still remember, with a mixture of rage and shame, opening the envelope containing the cover design for my penultimate horror paperback, You’re Next! 

It was so badly conceived, so ineptly executed, so gormless, so cosmically unfrightening,  so much designed to ensure that the book would be remaindered before it even hit the shelves (or a shelf in the publisher’s reception area – I couldn’t imagine any bookstore actually wanting to pollute their shop by displaying it) that the world, as they say, almost dropped out of my bottom.

I knew – just as surely as someone standing on an exotic beach, watching a 60ft tsunami thundering towards them – that it was all over.

I phoned my editor to complain, but somehow all the keenness of a few weeks before had evaporated: it was as if I’d imagined all those promises of heavy selling into W.H. Smith and John Menzies. I was so comprehensively dead in the water, she could barely be bothered to argue with me: I’d already been consigned to the publishing equivalent of the Chiltern Hundreds.

Luckily, the freelance job I’d been doing at the BBC had just been advertised as a permanent post, and I’d been havering about whether to go for it, in case it interfered with my writing career. As my publisher had effectively signalled that that career was now officially over, I positively raced into work to hand in my application.

Writers hate to admit it, but, back in the days before multi-channel TV and VHS tapes and DVDs, when uneducated people lapped up the sort of genre pulp fiction I used to write, the Cover was King.  Genre fiction didn’t used to get reviewed (apart from crime), so unless one of those companies whose job was to review everything (“This book is sort of alright” Kirkus Reviews ) stomped up a decent snippet, or unless you could squeeze a nice quote out of a more successful novelist, there was nothing for the reader to go on other than the title, the cover, and the blurb on the back (which, in any case, I’d already taken to writing myself). 

The first two books I wrote (under the pen-name Alexander Scott) were D.K. Broster-style 18th Century
Highland flings. They were meant to be the opening salvos of an immensely lucrative series entitled Highland Rebel, (starring Sean Connery in the film versions, naturally) and, as I was writing them, I’d imagined covers featuring a huge, hairy Scots berserker roaring out at the reader with his unfeasibly enormous claymore clasped menacingly above his head, preparing to wreak mayhem on a bunch of effete English poofs. What I got was a beautifully painted pastoral view of a sea shore with a cluster of little figures of indeterminate gender doing Highlandy things while a ship sailed away in the distance. It wouldn’t have looked out of place on a tin of “Haste Ye Back!” Highland shortbread.

Unsurprisingly, both books stiffed.

By way of contrast, I was very lucky with my first horror novel, The Cats, an unashamed rip-off of James Herbert’s hugely successful gore-fest, The Rats. The cover was dead simple, consisting of nothing but a moggy snarling out at the reader. It sold copiously.

My next novel, The Scourge, featured one of the most revolting covers in the history of the horror genre. Even I was appalled. (Sainsbury’s had started selling paperbacks around that time, and complaints from customers led to the book being withdrawn from their stores - I just hoped they hadn’t put the book rack near the meat counter!). Inevitably, it too sold quite splendidly.

                               

Meanwhile, the same titles were doing vaguely okay in the States, where horror covers at that time were strangely anaemic. When it came to my fourth novel, though, things changed. The Surrogate was a fairly quiet, rather creepy little ghost story. The Yanks gave it a nicely gloomy, atmospheric cover – and, with the help of a great quote from that very generous chap, Stephen King – it sold really well and ensured I could go on writing for another few years. The UK cover was a crude, cartoony imitation of the original – and here the book did all right, but no cigar.

But covers can’t buck the market. My last book, Steel Gods –probably the best-plotted and best-written of the lot  – had a great cover, and a nice quote from James Herbert, but didn’t trouble the bestseller charts. By then, the bull market in horror had turned distinctly bearish. When the public decides a genre needs to go into hibernation, the greatest cover on earth can’t help (although a better title might have).