You may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but a good cover helps sell it.
When Yuangrat and I were writing Beads on a String: A Novel of Southern Siam we spent little time thinking about one of the keys to getting people to buy it: the cover. We should have known better because we spent weeks working with a designer to create the cover for our 2019 book, “Radical Thought, Thai Mind” and I am not sure the final rather conceptual design has been good for sales.
Fortunately, once River Books decided to publish Beads they contacted Cover Kitchen, a Bangkok-based company that does nothing but design book covers. I asked Cover Kitchen founder and owner, Xavier Comas about his approach to cover design.
“For an historical novel we started by trying to understand the essence of the book and then do research on that period,” Comas said. “We want to understand what people wore, how they looked and what was going on back then.”
“The most important thing is to set the tone of voice, partly through the concept, but also through the execution,” he said. This tone, he said, has to be specially conceived to fit each book.
For Beads on a String, he said he was looking for “a tone that was both romantic and melancholic,” that evoked a sense of time past. Given that one of the most powerful characters in the story is a young woman, Comas said, the key was finding the right image of the right woman for the cover.
“We spent many hours searching for her,” he said. “She had to look attractive and Thai, but also determined, even a little bit dangerous.”
Yuangrat and I tried to help by suggesting period photographs like this one, but they seemed stiff and not quite right.
This was one of the stock historical photos we suggested that Comas rejected.
Comas and his team also had difficulties. Most of the modern photographs they found were of sweetly smiling young women who didn’t fit with the strong-minded heroine of our tale. He said he tried taking some original photographs with a model, but he wasn’t satisfied.
“We had to dig deeper,” Comas said. So he continued searching through websites and photographs until finally he found the right image.
“I was totally blown away by her,” he said.
Comas then wanted to bring in other elements of our saga, which has six main characters and explores several different themes. But, he said, too many images on the cover would make it look cluttered and confused. In the end, he chose images of a Chinese junk and a southern Thai river because they suggested the location of the story, the Thai-Chinese cultural clash that is one theme, and the central role a sailing junk plays in the plot.
Then the team had to meld the woman, the junk and the river together into a unified image. To suggest that this was a story of the past, Comas added a texture like hand-made paper to the combined images.
“We also chose a font from the end of the 19th century for the title and gave it a color taken from the sail of the junk that is also one of the classic colors of traditional Thai art,” Comas said.
The final touch was to add a string of Buddhist prayer beads to the back cover.
Comas said he used Photoshop software to combine the images, balance the colors and establish the texture. The final image, he said, has 40 layers.
Yuangrat and I love the cover design and we hope others will too.
This was the final design by Xavier Comas, along with a jacket blurb by editor Nicholas Grossman and comments by authors Suzanne Fisher Staples and Kong Rithdee.
I asked Comas how many book covers he has designed in his career and was startled when he said “thousands.” He explained that he works with a team that in an average month produces some 60 to 70 covers. “I have been doing this for over 30 years,” he said, “so do the math.”
That experience, along with Comas talent as a photographer and writer of a book about Thailand’s deep south (The House of the Raja) made him the perfect designer for our book cover.
The book launch for Beads on a String is set for the evening of December 3 with a party at the elegant Chakrabongse Villas on the Chao Phraya River just across from the Temple of the Dawn. Yuangrat and I will talk a bit about the book and sign copies. If you would like to attend this launch party, email us at PWedel@gmail.com and we will send you an invitation.
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