Book Post - Pills, Skulls and Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy. The Cover.

Gerrard King's Memento Mori

The search for a cover image for Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy was a long one. It was always going to be a mission to follow on from Jessy Shoucair's 'Lipstick Bullet' on the cover of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

The image had to be strong, stark and striking and somehow representative of the book itself. I spent long hours playing with various ideas, eventually settling on skulls and pills, an occlusion of the 'deadly' nature of the story and the dependency of protagonist, dying diplomat Jason Hartmoor, on painkillers and enzymes. There's also quite a lot of heroin in the book. If you're gonna do drugs, I reckon you might as well go all out, see?

I found one stock shot that seemed to go down that road, a skull and crossbones made from pills that I shared with the nice people on my mailer (Look! To the right! You can sign up too and get occasional updates, freebies and answer silly questions about book covers!), asking them what they thought. The answer duly came back and it boiled down to 'get what you're doing there but meh.'

A few more frustrated hours of playing with ideas and Googling followed before I stumbled across an image that leapt out of the screen, stuck its fingers up my nostrils and smacked my head on the keyboard. It was one of a series created by Australian artist Gerrard King, called 'Memento Mori'. I hit Gerrard up on Facebook and we quickly agreed a license for me to use his image on the book and in promotional work for Shemlan. Oddly enough, it turned out he had some history with Dubai - for a time he had been a 'trolly dolly' on Emirates. Seven points of separation and all that, see?

Gerrard's art is startling, surreal and bold stuff - you can follow the links below to explore more of his wild forays into gibbering insanity. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to interview 'Mr Pill Skull'...

What started your fascination with skulls as canvases? 
My thing for the skull has really incubated since youth. From the very first one adorning my school bag in '88 (I think it was Guns n Roses) to what you see now. The skull to me, is a perfect sculptural form with an ever-changing mood. It can be classical one minute and hair metal the next!

Why the pill/skull occlusion. What made you think of the image? 
The Memento Mori series really is about juxtaposing elements of pop, fashion and western culture with the classic skull, echoing the deep-rooted tradition of skull ornamentation prevalent in other cultures. The pill design harks to a classic '70s fabric design by Marimekko, which takes on a sense of irony when combined with the skull. I kept thinking of the song 'Mother's Little Helper' by The Rolling Stones while doing this piece.

Your work splits into pop, surrealism, realism and skulls. Will there be a fifth category? 
It's true that I do not like to be pigeon-holed with a particular style, preferring to float between whichever means serve the end. I couldn't say what I may do next, so yes, I will probably add another arrow to my quiver somewhere along the line.

Where do you sell most of your work - do you generally feel 'understood'? 
I sell my artwork at events, self-organised exhibitions and markets, as well as online. Living in a tourist area, one can easily feel misunderstood by throngs of holiday-makers looking for beach scenes and cutesy mementos. I have developed a bit of a support crew where I live who continually support my endeavours and drink free wine at my exhibitions!

Is this your first book cover? Do you see Gerrard King placemats or biscuit tins looming over the horizon? 
Ha ha! Yes this is my first cover image on an intelligent publication. I draw the line at prints and tee shirts for now, but if they were damn fine biscuits, well...!

Here's Gerrard's website with galleries and the like or you can see what he's getting up to here on Facebook.

And here, of course, is the handy link to buy Shemlan: A Deadly Tragedy  complete with its scary cover in paperback, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android tablet or iPad formats!

Olives – A Violent Romance

This is the cover art for Olives - A Violent Romance, my first published novel. It's quite a high-res file so you can click on it and get it nice and big if you like. It’s by Naeema Zarif, a lady whose work has long enthralled me. Naeema is responsible for the iconography of GeekFest, her work on the various GeekFest posters increasingly taking on the style of her own art – a distinctive series of images consisting of a range of juxtaposed elements creating a whole that makes your eyes flit around trying to decipher what’s going on in the resulting melange. There’s often a great deal of wit, subtlety and game-playing, but Naeema is a natural tease and likes to leave the viewer to try and sort it all out rather than giving the game away.

My own cover for Olives, designed back when I needed one to post an early version of the manuscript up on Harper Collins’ Authonomy, consisted of a photo of some olives together with the word (wait for it) 'Olives' in my favourite typeface of all time, Gill Perpetua. I have long admired stonecutter and typographer Eric Gill, who combined being a darling of the Catholic church with a singularly robust sex life involving most of the women who ever met him.

Naeema’s art for Olives, when it arrived, blew me away. It’s utterly not what I expected, and yet seems so, well ‘right.’ It also, critically, works well as a thumbnail – today’s book cover needs to work as a booky book cover, a Kindle book cover (in colour as well as mono, BTW - don't forget the Kindle Fire!) and also as a thumbnail for Amazon.com and other sites.

It’s no surprise the cover of Olives consists of a number of elements. It’s a mash of images that come from Naeema’s reading of the book, there are elements resonant of multi-theism – Amman’s citadel is in there (look for a shape a little like ‘in’ at an angle across the cover), there is the earth the olives come from, the land and its importance are such an important part of Olives. The blues of the Mediterranean sky and the water are there, too. And so is parchment, a symbol of the unravelling peace the book is wound around. You’ll be hard put to find ‘em, but there are even some olives in there. Together, these things all speak to Olives – to the fundamentals that underpin the book. And behind the title, in faded characters, Mahmoud Darwish’s famous words – which form the frontispiece to Olives: “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”

It’s a remarkable piece of art and I’m very proud to have it grace and represent my work

Being able to select who designs my cover is, of course, a huge privilege open pretty much only to self published writers - publishing companies don't consult authors about their covers, that's a marketing decision and one not to be made by a mere scribbler (or 'content producer'). I suppose you get an option once you sell your first million copies or so, but I know a number of published authors who were told, 'This is your book's cover, matey', which was the beginning and end of the conversation. I'd always hoped if I landed a contract they'd let me at least pitch Naeema's hat into the ring, but I sort of knew that was a forlorn hope. But now I'm in control, I get to have my cake and eat it.

And it tastes just dandy...