If there’s a synchronicity involved in this post, it’s that it took 26 years for one of my novels to get the cover it deserves. This story is a look inside the quirky world of publishing in the U.S.
In 1986, my third novel, Dark Fields, was published by Ballantine Books. It turned out to be the first in a series of 10 novels featuring private detective Quin St. James and police detective Mike McCleary. It takes place in Miami, a spot that was really starting to heat up in the 80s because of the revival of South Beach and the popularity of the original TV show, Miami Vice.
In the story, Quin’s world is turned inside out when her lover, Grant Bell, is murdered and she begins to uncover layers of secrets that make her realize she didn’t know him at all. She teams up with Miami police detective Mike McCleary, who is also pursuing a female serial killer who picks up her victims in singles’ bars. To find the killer, they must pierce their own perceptual blind spots, their dark fields.
The female serial killer uses a knife on her victims and for some reason, this knife became the emblem for the book cover. And for the next 7 books, every cover in the series featured a weapon. It struck me as completely lacking in imagination. I mean, c’mon, it’s South Florida, where are the palm trees? The ocean? The beaches? How about some flash and pizazz of South Beach? I mentioned this to my agent, my editor, but apparently the dye was cast. The art department or the sales department had made the decision that the covers had to have a weapon on them. See?
In the early 90s, my editor at Ballantine passed away and I moved to Hyperion Books, a Disney-owned company, and they published the last three books in the series. Those covers were outstanding. Here’s one of them, Blue Pearl, a kind of Art Deco style:
Dark Fields eventually went out of print and the rights were reverted to me in 1999. With the advent of e-books, I decided to bring the book out in digital format, through Smashwords. Big problem. I didn’t have a digital file of the book, which was originally typed on an old-fashioned typewriter – remember those? To get it into digital form, each page would have to be scanned from the book.
I contacted Katrina Joyner, who Phyllis Vega, my co-author for Power Tarot, had recommended. Katrina had converted one of my astrology books into the Smashwords format and designed a great cover for it. She quoted me a reasonable price for Dark Fields that covered: scanning, converting the book into a Word file, then into the Smashwords format, and for designing a cover. Katrina read the book as she scanned it and we tossed ideas back and forth about the cover – beaches, old boats, a noire look. Then one afternoon, I remembered the killer’s reference to blackbird, the song: Black bird singing in the dead of the night…. Katrina seized that and ran with it. Here’s the result:
So Dark Fields finally has a fitting cover and I think Quin and McCleary would be happy with it, too. Ironically, it’s priced at 95 cents less than the original book, which was $3.95 (hard to believe paperbacks were so inexpensive 26 years ago!). Its pages will never turn yellow and fade.
i’d not seen the poe trailer when i was here last – then, last night there it was – on the first channel i turned to – can’t wait!
It looks good, doesn’t it?!
Love it! Can’t wait for the time to actually sit down and read the series.
For me, one of the sad things about having one’s work published is that the editor often takes it apart and puts it back together again, and the final product in no way resembles the author’s original work. Guess that’s why editors and authors MUST be on the same page…no pun intended….or it’s tragic sometimes. Can’t wait to read DARK FIELDS!!! Sequels, too?????
My editor for this book left it pretty much intact, as I’d written it. But you’re right, that’s not always true. There are 9 other books in the series. I don’t have the rights back yet for the last three. Who knows how long that will take!
Interesting. I naively thought the author would have input into a cover when in book form.
Some authors probably do, Mike. Stephen King, J.K. Rowling….
I LOVE that Blue Pearl cover.
First, congratulations! Second….have you seen the commercials on TV for the new movie coming out, “RAVEN”….about Poe? John Cusack is in the role of Poe. It looks intriguing, as does your book! I was immediateley reminded of the new movie when I saw this book cover. Synchro, at least for me.
Ii think I saw a trailer for the movie. It’s on my must see list!
the whole thing of how some book covers come about within the publishing industry is mystifying to me – sometimes it seems as if no one there has actually read the book tfor which they are doing the cover – however, in the cases of blue pearl and dark fields, these covers above are dynamite! i’m such a visually-oriented person that i have to have that extra bit of dynamite to pick up a book in the first place – and even if the title is dynamite [as these and your others are also] i may pass a book by based upon its cover – i know i know – don’t judge a book by its cover – but for me, the visual is paramount – so glad you’re getting your books into e-format, trish – now, it’s just a matter of my 9yr old granddaughter downloading for me into my tablet! 😉
A great cover is what pulls me in, too, Gypsy. Getting the rights back on some of these books is a whole other story.
How cool is that? I had no idea that the process of turning a book from the written page could be so involved. Of course, nowadays everything is digital. I wonder how the old classics that I’ve been reading were converted. Probably something like your Dark Fields books was, I suspect. Very interesting, Trish!
Those classics were probably scanned page by page into a word processing file, then converted into digital format.
So what you’re saying here in this post Trish is that…
“All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise” .-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaSMROk-D-A
Funny!