Thoughts on book covers--and Jacob

I've been reading blogs about book covers--or faces, as we call them "in the trade." I've long known that many of the distributors who fill paperback racks in the groceries and drugstores of the nation lay out a bunch of covers and pick the ones they want--no attention to content, though some to author name recognition. If you're big, like say John Grisham or Nora Roberts, your name is in large type at the top of the cover, the title smaller and below. For most of us, the title is at the top and the name below. Still, we want our titles and names to "pop" out at the reader and the design to be compelling enough to draw a browser's eye, make him or her think he might want to read that book. It's something we struggle with all the time at TCU Press (although we don't do mass market paperbacks). Are the colors right? Is that the right image? Usually designers submit four or five possibilities for us to choose from.
But it all makes me think of the cover of my "breakout" book, if it could be called such. It was my first book from Bantam (previously I had published with Doubleday's western series, which as I understand it went mostly to subscription buyers such as libraries and prisons). Bantam (part then of Doubleday/Bantam/Dell) went to bookstores and you could always hope the book would have at least some time face rather than spine out.
The book was Libbie, a fictional biography of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, carrying her life to the point of George Armstrong Custer's death at Little Big Horn. The cover featured a voluptuous, dark-haired, sensual woman standing in knee-deep grass by a barbed wire fence. In the background, on bare brown dirt, was a fort, securely surrounded by a stockade. The problems were many: one friend said it looked like Madonna in period dress. More serious was the barbed wire fence: barbed wire was introduced in San Antonio in something like 1873; Custer died in 1876; there clearly had not been enough time to fence the West. Also Libbie stood in that deep grass of perhaps the Kansas plains but the fort behind her stood on the bare dry earth of Arizona. And the stockade? No western forts had stockades--there wasn't enough lumber in the West. In fact, in the manuscript, Libbie commented on her surprise that the forts were simply a ring of buildings without any surrounding protection--it scared her. I would like to plead that I was young, but I wasn't--this was in the early 1990s. But it was my first major commercial book, and I wasn't about to make waves. When I finally decided to mention it, it was too late. Another later book cover, on Cherokee Rose, featured a sultry blonde version of rodeo cowgirl and roper Lucille Mulhall, whose life formed the basis for the story even if I altered both the name and the facts. She stood with a horse looking over her shoulder--only the horse was disembodied. All it had was a head, no body behind her. I protested, andn the horse went. But that book sold less well than my other historicals. For some reason they were all published trade size (6x9) rather than the smaller paperback size, where I think they might have done better.
Jacob is here tonight. This is a picture of him at his happiest, watching "Beauty and the Beast" with a sippeee cup of milk (note the pumpkin on his face, which I promised not to wash off). He arrived cheeerful, had a dust-up with his mom over who would hold the DVD disk (he's broken some) and after she told him goodby and left, he had one of the worst "Where's Mommy?" fits he's ever had. Then he trundled back to "Beauty and the Beast," pointed out to me that I had to push play, and was content though far from cordial. Thank you, Marcia, for reminding me that two-year-olds soon turn into more predictable three-year-olds. When the movie ended, Jacob was again all fun and games, playing hide and seek, etc. Then he got the stool and put it next to his bed, an indication to me he was ready for bed, but then he said, "Not ready for bed." He did however climb on the stool and get in. I'm not sure he's asleep yet. There are long periods of quiet, but then I hear him on the monitor saying something very loud. We shall see.