Book Parodies

The Huffington Post [via] has fun with some very popular book covers. Among the books lampooned are Dan Brown's new one, Stephanie Meyer's last one, and of course, this one. Readers are also invited to send in their own.

In a Bind

The Guardian website features a gallery of the finalists of the Designer Bookbinders International Competition. These are covers to swoon over.

Penguin Australia Goes Retro Orange

This picture (left) made me feel quite nostalgic for those old-fashioned Penguins with the orange and white covers and the happy memories of reads gone by.

Penguin Australia brought out a budget collection of 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction titles in the Penguin Popular series, and the sales have exceeded all expectations, Tom Reilly in the Age reports.

The Brits (and remember that Penguin is a British company) were more cautious and rejected the idea ... and are most probably kicking themselves after bad sales over Christmas.

The low-price philosophy goes back to the whole ethos on which Allen Lane based his business more than 70 years ago - each book is cheaper than a packet of cigarettes.

I don't know whether we will get to see these copies here, but they are certainly Penguins I would want to pick up!

More Classics Repackaged

There's a new set of repackaged classics to smile at on the Guardian website. (Inspired of course by Bookninja.)

I'd definitely buy this one!

Rebranding - Bookninja Style

How you like the saucy new cover for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

Yes, it is a joke, sort of.

Earlier this month Bookninja asked :

Are top novelists being rebranded to meet the purchasing habits of an embiggened sector of stupid readers?

in response to this very worrying article in The Independent about novelist Margaret Drabble being under pressure from her publishers to "rebrand" her fiction ... i.e. dumb down.

Bookninja invited blog readers to send in their cover designs for the classics rebranded as more popular genres, and many rose to the challenge with hilarious results. You are invited to vote for the winner by email, but voting closes today so you need to be quick.

Postscript :

Think you can do even better? Now the Guardian is inviting you to send in your own efforts.

Celebrating Mr. Eng from Penarth

At least Starmag noticed we had a Malaysian on the Booker longlist! They reproduced the piece from the Guardian I linked to the other day and slipped into brackets an e-mail response from Tan Twan Eng:

It's an immense honour for a first-time novelist ... I received the news on Tuesday night and was completely stunned - I still am! I am thrilled to be in such esteemed company like McEwan and A.N.Wilson.

I'm also gratified that the judges are open to voices coming from South-East Asia. There is a huge pool of talented writers here waiting to be discovered by the rest of the world, with compelling stories to tell.

Meanwhile it's Booker silly season, and this year, thanks to Twan we feel we have a ringside seat.

Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog has decided to discuss one book from the list each week working down the list in alphabetical order, even though that means the final book will be discussed long after the prize is awarded!

Of course, given a name like Tan Twan Eng, of course the surname must be Eng (!), and therefore The Gift of Rain gets discussed in week 4!

(I remember Viz getting all humpfy in the comments on this blog one day about Malaysian Chinese authors switching round their names so the family name comes last e.g. Tinling Choong, Yang-May Ooi, but now you see how confused a western audience can be!)

This is not the only Chinese name that gives problems on the list: Sam Jordison finds Peter Ho Davies middle name "rather amusing" as he has a go at judging the longlisted books by their covers. Of The Gift of Rain he says:

I'm not sure what the butterflies and torn bits of wallpaper signify, and the red and gold type has unfortunate echoes of a cheap Chinese restaurant. All the same, the back-cover blurb about aikido and knowledge coming "at a terrible price" sounds exciting and I'm already biased in the book's favour as it's a product of one of the two independent publisher underdogs on the list.

(My favourite covers, by the way, are those for Lloyd Jones' Mr. Pip and Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl.)

And talking of Wales, did you know that The Gift of Rain is actually set ... ahem ... in Penarth?

Our Mr. Eng is learning exciting new things about his novel all the time!

Cover Story

Philip Tatham of Monsoon Books thanks you all for your feedback about the cover for John Dodd's forthcoming book A Company of Planters. He writes:

As with most online polls, one has to expect a mixed bag of constructive criticism and, well, just criticism. We took all of the views into consideration ... too dull, none of the above, too brown, odd machine gun, Gollum lookalike ... and decided to start from scratch! Option 1 is obviously aesthetically pleasing as it is simple and symmetrical but the Gollum references -- and queries from a number of other people about the origins of the boy: was he African, South American, Indonesian? -- forced us to drop it from the running. Despite the machine gun confusion -- don't Malaysians know planters were issued with arms during the Emergency period? -- we strongly felt that Option 2 and 3 were more relevant to the story. After all, the image is of a real planter in 50s Malaya. Back in Dublin our designer tweaked fonts, increased the subtitle point size, extended the photograph, repositioned text, handcoloured the bag and cushion and added texture to the image. The result, we hope, is a cover with character that will entice browsers to pick the book up and read the backcover text. Of course we could now ask your readers for their help with the backcover text but, from experience, we would never come to an agreement!

We really valued the input from your readers and I'm sorry we couldn't choose Option 1 but we felt the comments required us to step back and rethink the design. We can never please everybody but I hope those who voted for Option 1 will take a look at the book if they see it in the bookshop!

A huge thank you to everybody who voted and commented, you really did help us with the cover design for this book.

So who won the competition? We decided that we had to work on The Visitor's appauling ignorance. We felt desperately sorry for jy living in the land of chocs and clocks but deprived of books in English. And we enjoyed secret history's great story about her toothless grandfather.

Can each of the winners please send me their full postal addresses so Philip can post you a copy? (My e-mail is sbakar at streamyx dot com)

What's in a Cover?

First impressions count - whether we're meeting someone new, or browsing new titles in the bookshop. As Jamelah Earle says on the Literary Kicks website:

Of course, it's no secret that design is an art form, and book cover design is one of its most specialized genres. ... It's one thing to create a good design, but something much greater to create a good design that manages to incorporate a book's subject matter and present it in a way that will make people want to read what's underneath the cover.

Publisher Philip Tatham of Singapore-based Monsoon Books would appreciate you advice about a book cover with a Malaysian theme. A Company of Planters: Confessions of a Colonial Rubber Planter in 1950s Malaya by John Dodd is due to be released here at the end of March.

The blurb on the book reads:

With true stories that would make even Somerset Maugham blush, this memoir offers a fascinating and often hilarious glimpse of colonial life in 1950's Malaya. But life was more than just a series of stengahs in the club house, dalliances in the Chinese brothels of Penang and charming “pillow dictionaries” – there were strikes, riots, snakes, plantation fires and deadly ambushes by Communist terrorists to contend with.

Which cover, in your opinion, will appeal more to book buyers in Malaysia? (The covers below were all created by a designer based in Dublin: she won "best fiction cover design" award in Ireland last year).

The one that receives most votes in this poll will be the one used, so this is your chance to feed into the publishing process.

Option A

Option B

Option C

Which cover do you like best?
	Option A?
	Option B?
	Option C?
pollcode.com free polls

And now announcing this blog's first competititon with real prizes (not just "You can take me to lunch if you win" which hasn't had a huge number of takers, for some reason.)

Philip is giving away copies of this book to the three people who make the best case for receiving a copy.

Post your entries in the comments. You have one week. The competition is open to overseas readers of this blog too, and will be judged by Philip and meself.