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.