One of the studio visits was at Serpent's Tail publishing, an independent publishing house owned by Profile.
Our appointment was with the marketing director Niamh Murray. She showed us lots of really great book covers and explained how it goes from an idea to a finished book cover. She showed us examples of rough work that had been sent to her from various illustrators and explained why it wasn't suitable or why they had to change it for the finished cover.
She also talked about Amazon and that to successfully market a book on there you have to have a suitable cover. The title needs to be large and easy to read because Amazon only allows you to see a small thumbnail example of the book. This is something I have never considered when designing book covers in past projects.
Another interesting thing she talked about was how an illustrator had sent in his own interpretation of a series of published books as an example of what he was capable of. As a result he did eventually get the chance to do the cover art for one of their books. This is worth doing to catch the attention of a potential client. Seeing an illustrators work in context can clearly make a huge difference.
I've never really felt that my work is suited for book covers and haven't enjoyed producing them in the past. Unfortunately it's something I'm going to have to consider when producing the cover of my children's book in the near future. This visit was very informative, inspiring and have given me a lot to think about.
Before we left we got the chance to have a short portfolio visit with the art director Peter Dyer. One by one we went and showed him our work away from the group. When it got to my turn I suddenly felt quite nervous. We sat down and he immediately began looking through my portfolio. He flicked past the first few pages without saying anything. He got to the monsters and I felt that I should say something as it had been silent up til now. I said that I was hoping to become a children's book illustrator after graduation and that my strong point was character design.
He replied something along the lines of 'well I don't know anything about children's books so I can't really give you any feedback.'
I kept quiet again after that...
Once he reached the end of my portfolio he said that my new pig story art work was an improvement on my Uganda story work. I thanked him and gave him one of my business cards but I couldn't help feeling that the whole thing had been a waste of both of our times.
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