The Art of the Cover

At its best, a novel entertains, inspires, edifies, delights, and challenges. But authors, driven by the content of their stories, often underestimate the value of cover art and book design.

Readers, however, often judge a book by its cover.

How well does the art complement themes in the story? How well does the art draw in prospective readers? Independent of the story, how memorable, beautiful, or compelling is the art itself? John Herreid observes:

Certain ways of laying out a cover communicate the content with a succinct visual shorthand… with fiction it goes further. You want to clearly indicate: is this literary fiction? Is this genre fiction? If it’s genre fiction, what genre? What’s the general feel of the story? While with non-fiction, I can usually just skim the book and read a chapter or two to get a feel for the work, with fiction I read the manuscript carefully. You want to pull a few things from the plot and characters for the cover, but without “spoiling” or misleading. A pet peeve when I was a teenager was mass-market paperbacks with cover illustrations that bore little resemblance to the work inside. You can easily avoid that by… actually reading what the author wrote. It’s not hard!

As an author, I always want to start with a rousing story and then go deeper into themes, choices, motivations, and higher things,too. A common theme is hope, even when it’s not immediately evident. I enjoy exploring different genres, different eras, different cultures, different outlooks on the world, often sprinkled with science.

My first novel published by Ignatius Press was Toward the Gleam, a story inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and other 20th-century luminaries, that dives into Jesus’ admonition “For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be,” how this is discerned in the context of a globe-trotting thriller. John Herreid states:

For the two books I designed for T.M. Doran, the one I enjoyed working on the most was Toward the Gleam, mostly because I was able to work with one of my favorite artists, Daniel Mitsui. I sent him a rough sketch of what I wanted, with spiders, Oxford, and some samples of illustrations by Tolkien. From there, I took his final illustration and added gold and silver ink and cream color to offset the black and white of the drawing. I liked Daniel’s work so much that I asked him for the frontispiece, which I think added a lot to the final look of the book. It’s definitely in my top ten favorite covers I have worked on.

Terrapin, my second Ignatius Press novel, is very different than Toward the Gleam. Terrapin is a small scale coming-of-age mystery-thriller that features a blue collar town like the one I grew up in, and how the past is never really past. Terrapin looks at complicated friendships that bridge childhood and adult lives, and it is the most autobiographical of all my novels. John observes:

For Terrapin, I first worked out that I wanted a hand-drawn title similar to book covers from the 1950s and 60s. Looking at books on my shelves, I ended up using the lettering from a Graham Greene novel as primary inspiration. From that starting point, I tried a number of images. Finally settling on the image of a truck. I also wanted to add a dramatic element: bloodstains, so I took a piece of printer paper and dripped strong tea on it that I had let steep for an hour or so. After the spatters dried, I scanned them in and adjusted color to make it look like dried blood. In the final printed cover, the title was given a spot gloss treatment that made the lettering stand out a bit.

Iota is a short novel about keeping one’s humanity intact in the midst of severe trials, an examination, perhaps a contest, of ideas in a post-WWII Soviet detention camp near Berlin. This story explores what heroism looks like under duress, and how it’s possible for heroism to evolve in people. Iota was inspired by histories of this period and by conversations with people who actually lived behind the iron curtain. Milo Persic created the cover design and artwork for this novel: minimalistic, vivid, evocative of danger.

Seeing Red, published in March 2024, features a screenwriter with an Academy Award on his shelf whose career and life have gone off the rails. The story takes place in a country both like and unlike modern America. While human dignity is the most prominent theme, unlikely friendships are just as important. Betrayal and what that does to a person plays a part too.

A strong filmmaking motif anchors the story, and prominent characters in Seeing Red may remind readers of Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone. The cover design by Pawel Cetlinski features a noir image of an ambiguous-looking man under a spotlight. Is he on a stage or film set, under interrogation or in prison? The title coloring, too, is ambiguous with Seeing in red letters and Red in white letters.

For the best cover art, readers can judge—at least, begin to judge—a book by its cover.

Let my valedictory be delivered in a much different voice. I have contributed dozens of articles that address faith, life, evidence and reason, Truth and Beauty, to the secular media over the last 30 years, in addition to these Ignatius Press novels that I so much enjoyed composing. Yet society and the culture continue to march backwards, opposite to faith, life, Truth, Beauty, evidence. If change occurs, my children and grandchildren will have to take up the standard. My Season is waning—or has already waned.

In the meantime, I still rejoice in art that celebrates Truth and Beauty in all its myriad forms. That is enough for me in this Season.