Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Art Director Speaks!

The SFBC's current art director, Matthew Kalamidas, has been interviewed by Irene Gallo for Tor.com.

Matt's a good guy and a fine art director, though I never worked directly with him. (The 2007 event was breathtaking in its scope.) And I'm always interested in seeing behind-the-scenes publishing pros talk about what they do; there are a lot of agents and editors out there, but not many people doing other things.

However, I was surprised to see that the club did a new cover for Charles Stross's newest novel Saturn's Children (Here's the SFBC page, and here's the Ace cover at Amazon.) Perhaps things have changed -- have I mentioned that a lot of people who used to work there are now gone? -- but the long-time opinion of the legal folks used to be that if you gave a book a new cover, you couldn't compare it to the publisher's edition -- because it wasn't really comparable anymore.

(I probably can still remember that because it's one of the very few obvious and reasonable things a lawyer ever told me.)

I'm also amused that someone at the SFBC hated that cover so much that the club went to all that time, effort, and expense of making a new cover when there already was one ready-made. But that's the thing about covers: no matter what you do, there's always going to be somebody who hates it.

6 comments:

pwstrain said...

Well, in looking at the two covers, I'd have to say I like the SFBC cover better.

Anonymous said...

I have the SFBC cover, and I think I would have liked the tartish cover better. Besides, the SFBC cover doesn't actually typify a sex robot.

RobB said...

I saw that on Tor.com and was wondering the same thing. Odd thing is, I was cleaning out some paperwork and files last night and came across a bunch of recently old (1999-2004) SFBC mailers. Some of the images were tame and/or comparable to the Ace cover for SATURN'S CHILDREN.

Andrew Wheeler said...

RobB: The Ace Saturn's Children cover is pretty tame compared with a lot of the stuff that Luis Royo has done for the club over the years -- and several of his books are still in print, so the SFBC hasn't suddenly had a fit of prudishness.

I'm happy that they're still doing original covers, but I wish that they were doing them for more original books.

And this still seems like a really odd case to me -- when I was there, we'd do covers for paperbacks (particularly if we thought they were lousy), but I can't remember ever just slapping a new cover on a hardback in sixteen years.

Jo Walton said...

I remain everlastingly grateful to you personally for the help your input was in improving the cover on Farthing.

Andrew Wheeler said...

Bluejo: I was happy to help -- I often thought that a publisher had done something wrong with a cover, but only rarely had a chance to help nudge it over towards something better.

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