The future looks bookish.

I recently received this email from David Shelley at Hachette Publishing, along with many other contributors to the book industry, and am sharing it here as it contains some beautifully positive, useful and curious insights into the landscape of books right now, as we move away from a pandemic into a different set of 'challenging' circumstances.

As you will know, I love books - buying, reading, designing and illustrating them - and people sometimes ask me whether 'books are dead', or on the decline; the rather simplistic assumption being that digital advances have somehow pushed paper books off the shelf.

One of the loveliest highlights is learning that things are actually rather good in the book world. Not fabulously, sunnily glowing, but productively optimistic, fuelled by a return to reading courtesy of pandemic-enforced hibernation, and a significant growth in the numbers of younger readers.

It's long, but well worth the read if, like me, you're a bit soul-tired of bad news, sad endings, scary AI stories and financial and political developments which feel at best threatening, and at their worst (usually at around 3am), malevolent. Take some joy from David's words as he talks about the growth in reading, strong book sales in Ukraine, Tik-Tokers' love for books - and an uptick in the manufacture of book cases!

(I also noted excitedly that Hachette have bought Paperblanks, whose delicious, bejewelled notebooks I have bought for years. Having not seen them around recently, I'm glad to hear they're still going to be there for my fevered collector's hands.)

Enjoy this chunk of gently uplifting news. It has been lightly edited for brevity.

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Dear authors, translators and illustrators,

 

I’m writing at the end of another eventful year to give an annual update on the current books market, to share some information about what’s happening at Hachette, and thoughts about what 2023 might hold for book publishing. 

 

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

 

As I think it’s important to find reasons to be cheerful right now, I thought I’d start with a few pieces of positive information about the overall state of the books market. Firstly, the data to the end of October shows that print book sales in the UK slightly increased in 2022 on 2021 – which was already a buoyant year for sales. Our figures show that audiobook sales have also shown some growth, and that ebook sales have remained steady.

 

Given the economic challenges in the UK, this is extremely heartening to see. There is a truism that two products are more able to withstand recessions than most – books and chocolate, because both are affordable luxuries that repay investment with great pleasure. For the hours of enjoyment that one gets from books and the depth of their emotional impact, I think they are terrific value for money compared to many other forms of entertainment (gaming, cinema, TV), and this year’s robust sales bear this out.

 

It is even better to see because, as has been well-documented, there was a boom in reading during lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. The fact that the market has remained strong – and a long way up on the pre-Covid sales of 2019 - suggests that even after lockdowns had ended, people have kept up the reading habit. Looking back in history, there is precedent for this: there was a marked and permanent jump up in sales of novels after the Second World War as it was a habit that many acquired during that time. The hope is that these readers acquired during the Covid era will remain with us in the future.

 

In terms of trends in the market, the other thing to feel hopeful about is the boom in younger readers. We are seeing TikTok as an incredibly strong driver of book recommendations and sales, and much of this market is made up of teenagers and twentysomethings. Their preference is predominantly for physical books, and there is great focus from this market on the production values of books and an emphasis on collectability. One nice side-effect is a boom in the production of bookcases after gradual decline in previous years; many teenagers now have a large collection of books and want to display them. Plus there has been a real rise in the popularity of subscription boxes, where readers get a book every month; it feels like another testament to the power of curation, and how much people like having a book chosen for them.

 

Some key themes in fiction include novels that feature or combine romance, fantasy, suspense and that have inclusion at their heart. It’s always hard to generalise but a lot of the bestsellers recommended on TikTok feature worlds and experiences that are different to the reader’s own. I think we’re also seeing a (welcome) dissolving of borders between genres. Research has long shown that readers often don’t read within narrow genre parameters – ie wouldn’t categorise themselves as a ‘crime reader’ or ‘science fiction reader’ and that seems to be more true than ever for younger readers now who are more influenced by story and character than genre. As someone who used to work as an editor predominantly within a genre (crime) and was frequently annoyed by the way this was used by those outside it to compartmentalise or reduce the impact of it, I couldn’t be more pleased to see this largely artificial industry system start to crumble.

 

In non-fiction we have seen a real rise in our specialist publishing. Even though the internet holds information on every conceivable subject, people are increasingly turning to books to give them trusted, fact-checked and detailed information on a particular issue that they are invested in. One example of this is the success of our Jessica Kingsley list, which is the world’s leading publisher in the fields of autism, arts therapies and gender diversity and sold more books than ever in 2022.

 

One other very positive phenomenon is the continued rise of independent bookshops, not just in the UK but also in India, Australia and other key markets. The rise of ethical consumerism and localism seems to have grown during 2020-21 and we are seeing more consumers who want to buy their books from local and independent retailers. It’s something we’re keen on here as the hand-selling independent booksellers do can often launch an author’s career, and it’s why we’re proud to work with the Booksellers Association and to be the official sponsor of Independent Bookshops Week which had its biggest and best year yet in 2022.

 

The Future

 

I think it would be probably be reckless right now to try to predict what even the near future will hold for our industry as things are changing so fast. But the things we are gearing up for in 2023 are a continuation of the supply chain and consumer confidence challenges I mentioned earlier – none of these look set to get any better in the immediate future – yet also, I hope, a continued recognition that books are a vital way of getting through difficult times. Thinking about the books published across our lists, they variously provide escapism and entertainment; an educational route towards success; a means to help improve health, wellbeing or life satisfaction; a deep dive into complex issues that cannot be adequately covered in a social media post or newspaper article; a route into other people’s psychology; a source of joy for adults and children alike; and a vision for a better future.

 

Lastly, I just wanted to share one interesting export sales statistic with you, which is that we have observed that book sales in Ukraine were at exactly the same level in 2022 as in 2021 – this is in addition to various charitable books contributions. I think this is a striking testament to the bravery and tenacity of Ukrainian booksellers, a number of whom came to the Frankfurt Book fair and whom we met with there, and to the enduring power of books.

All my best,

David.

 

 

 

Sleight!

This book by Jennifer Sommersby is published today in the USA by Skyhorse Books and has the honour of having the only one of my covers ever had turned into a cake!

(I've done a cake before as an exhibition piece, but this was something different...)

But before we get to the iced version, here's the inked one. First, the blurb:

"Growing up in the Cinzio Traveling Players Company, Genevieve Flannery is accustomed to a life most teenagers could never imagine: daily workouts of extravagant acrobatics; an extended family of clowns; wild animals for pets; and her mother, Delia, whose mind has always been tortured by visions—but whose love Geni never questions. In a world of performers who astonish and amaze on a daily basis, Delia’s ghostly hallucinations never seemed all that strange . . . until the evening Geni and her mother are performing an aerial routine they’ve done hundreds of times, and Delia falls to her death.

That night, a dark curtain in Geni’s life opens. Everything has changed..."

Now I'm better at drawing animals these days, having got over my early phase of 'everything looks like a poorly gerbil', but this brief came with a request for elephants and lions - so I had some trepidation. The story is a dark one - actually quite a grown-up read, and since it landed in the middle of a lot of middle-grade and YA books, this one required a swerve of brain.

Although the layout came to me immediately, it took some time to get the feel right - colours were too bright, the lettering was too friendly, then too sinister - and the lion originally took centre stage:

  

- being replaced buy the big magic book that features in the novel:

and once approved, the artwork was inked in a bit at a time, with iPhone shots from the desktop sent to Kate to keep her updated:

As I Art Director Kate Gartner and I worked together we arrived at a satisfying balance of menace and energetic line and colour - with plenty of colour and mood tweaks along the way (I loved this really dark version). The stabby points from the title were removed too:

with the finished version looking like this:

The original art is now in the collection of the author Jennifer herself, who was delighted to receive some real ink-on-paper. I often talk to my authors about whether they'd like to acquire their original art - most do. But they're often surprised to receive paper with ink and pencil on it. My way of working is by no means unusual, but so many covers are handled entirely digitally, I think they appreciate the tangible, hands-on feel of slightly crusty, thick black ink applied with a very sharp nib!

Thank you to Jennifer and Skyhorse Publishing for the opportunity to do this cover.

Here's that cake, baked for Jennifer's Publishing Day Party!

Baked by Jenn's friend Jane in Vancouver.

When Light Left Us

This beautiful book is out today, and I had an excellent time developing the cover for it - mainly because I was specifically asked to get inking, and the entire cover was do be created from the ink work I love doing so much.

The book is an unusual work of Young Adult fiction - yes, it has an alien in it, but it's not sci-fi, nor is it fantasy.

The Good Reads review - always dependable - outlines the story thus:

When the Vasquez siblings’ father left, it seemed nothing could remedy the absence in their lives . . . until a shimmering figure named Luz appeared in the canyon behind their house.

Luz filled the void. He shot hoops with seventeen-year-old Hank’s hands. He showed fourteen-year-old Ana cinematic beauty behind her eyelids. He spoke kindly to eight-year-old Milo. But then Luz left, too, and he took something from each of them. As a new school year begins, Ana, Hank, and Milo must carry on as if an alien presence never altered them. But how can they ever feel close to other people again when Luz changed everything about how they see the world and themselves? 

In an imaginative and heartfelt exploration of human—and non-human—nature, Leah Thomas champions the unyielding bonds between family and true friends.

Here are the many stages of evolution that this cover went through - I had so many ideas, but as ever, you can use only one!

There were several ideas. Rather than traditional rejections, with this cover it was really organic process, and I sent along a lot of initial ideas as I had quite a few after reading the synopsis and parts of the manuscript. Making the type to be the main attraction was important, as was creating an air of expectancy and mystery - this story does, after all, involve an alien life form.

The figure, though devoid of an obvious gender or age, was deemed too literal a representation of this kind, friendly life form, whose name is Luiz, and who is described as a ‘shimmering figure’. I did love the figure though, and he’s stayed pinned up in my studio ever since! The scrubby, desert landscape was important to capture, so that took centre stage. Donna at Bloomsbury was the art director on this; we’ve worked together many times, so it was an easy process - she is very clear about what she likes, and is great at seeing things I can’t.

I really wanted a glowing moon, and this was created with my age-old technique of drawing through the coloured ink with bleach. This is one of my oldest ink-tricks - I discovered it as a young teen having borrowed my Dad’s Quink and nib pens - and I still use it today; you can see it in a lot of my work. It's incredibly satisfying to have to wait a few seconds for what you've drawn to emerge on the paper. All of the art was created with ink on A3 cartridge paper, then scanned and the final cover pieces together digitally. There was no tweaking of the ink work - just the type, which is created of several layers of ghostly, fading-in-and-out typeset layers.

Thank you to Donna at Bloomsbury for asking me to create this one - I loved every second of it!

Buy the book here.

The List

This was an interesting one - by Patricia Forde, this book is about a world where the very use of words itself is restricted, and the terrible consequences which could befall anyone who pluck words from outside the List:

"In the city of Ark, speech is constrained to five hundred sanctioned words. Speak outside the approved lexicon and face banishment. The exceptions are the Wordsmith and his apprentice Letta, the keepers and archivists of all language in their post-apocalyptic, neo-medieval world. 

On the death of her master, Letta is suddenly promoted to Wordsmith, charged with collecting and saving words. But when she uncovers a sinister plan to suppress language and rob Ark’s citizens of their power of speech, she realizes that it’s up to her to save not only words, but culture itself."

The hardcover comes with a selection of words from that list in sticker form so you can see for yourself how hard it would be to work with such a limited vocabulary. 

Nicole at Sourcebooks and I had ideas about this cover should look; an air of menace, and darkness, with hints of hope and empowerment. I made many variations to start with, exploring the idea of being muted, a mouth covered, a head full of words, and lots and lots of expressive, writhing ink textures, to suggest unrest and unease:

The final design was the tower block of words, Letta on top hurling sheets of paper into the wind.  From rough to final was a fairly quick process, and I really enjoyed doing the blocky type for this, a refreshing breakaway from the cursive swirls that have dominated my lettering life for the last twenty years!

Here's the rough:

And here's the final, with lovely glowing spine lettering:

Thank you Nicole for hiring me for this one - it was a joy!

Challenging Subjects Matter

I celebrated the last day of Black History Month (February) by going to see Hidden Figures at the pictures. A bewildering reminder of how very recently people of colour were treated so poorly (and a reminder that it's still happening around the globe) it's nevertheless a bright and lively film with sparkly dialogue and massively endearing characters - not to mention the 60s dresses - made all the more appealing because they're real people.

(Oh, and the main characters' mathematical genius makes all but the most cranially-blessed painfully aware of their comparatively amoeba-like grasp on sums).

I loved the film, and on the journey home started to think about something that's been dawning on me. I've never traditionally gone in for much political illustration, the result of a combination of having no natural aptitude for likenesses and a lifelong nervousness about getting my facts wrong, despite a reputation for not being shy about sharing an opinion. I've been driven to make a visual comment from time to time, but only when something truly strikes a chord and an image emerges naturally - if I want to, but have to force it, I'm reluctant to do it. Brexit, Prince, the death of Charlotte Bevan, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo - these are some of the things which triggered a genuine response.

So when politically-driven, editorial images are a huge and growing chunk of the imagery online, and responses to world events seem almost obligatory especially if you draw things for a living, I'd started to worry I was somehow not doing my job properly.

But, it occurred to me in the last few years I've been more involved with politically-charged subjects than I might have given myself credit for. Though as a youngster I secretly wished to be, I'm not Steve Bell, whose scalpel-edged cartoons my Dad and I would eagerly turned the pages for for in the Guardian every week. I'm not fast enough, nor do I have that all-important grasp of a good (if vicious) likeness. (Nowadays I'd rather like to be Stephen Collins anyway!) Instead, it's happened in other ways.

I worked for many years for the Southern Poverty Law Centre, set up to 'fight hate and bigotry and to seek justice for the most vulnerable members of our society' via litigation, education and other forms of advocacy, producing their annual non-religious Christmas card, each year being given a phrase to explore visually and to make a universally warm and positive greeting from:

I've since had the opportunity to handle some seriously challenging subject matter, in two chief areas; one is the medical sphere, which I'll be talking about in another blog, and the other, black history and the civil rights movement, producing the covers of books based in harrowing real-life events drawn from both, parts of history which are difficult and awkward to think about, books based in harrowing real-life events drawn from both.

It started with my new cover for the 50th anniversary edition of To Kill A Mockingbird published by Grand Central in 2010. Arguably the most famous book about the civil rights movement and changes in the deep south in the 1930s, Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, wrote that this book is what drove him to take up civil rights work and set up the SPLC in 1971. This was, then, something of a responsibility, and meant revisiting the book, re-reading it, and thinking again about what was at its core - and how much we had, or  hadn't, moved on.

Stella By Starlight published by Simon & Schuster NY came a couple of years later and used a similar semi-silhouette approach to tell the story of this book about the arrival, unexpectedly, of the Ku Klux Klan in a small southern town where eleventh-grader Stella and her little bother live. A subtlety of approach, without censoring the core element of the story was required - a burning cross is a potentially shocking thing, but it is that that kicks off the entire story - and a sensitive portrayal of these children was important, whose ethnicity needed to be obvious without being either cartoony or vague. I discovered I had an aptitude for little people, and pyjama detail! And Klan hats too...it was also the first font I created called, of course, 'Stella'.

'Midnight Without A Moon' by Linda Williams Jackson is woven around a story I remembered with a distant horror from school history lessons; that of 14 year old Emmett Till, the boy beaten to death by white men for allegedly wolf-whistling a white woman in a store in the 1950s. His mother insisted on an open coffin so that people would see the damage done to her son, and his case drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the US; Emmett posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.

He wasn't to feature on the cover but it was important I refreshed myself on his story, irrespective of its outcome (his killers were acquitted) and the violent imagery that is associated with his case. The book blends a real historical family with a fictional one, and it is Rosa, the 13 year old girl who lives one town along, who was the focus of the cover. We do not see her face; as with the previous two books, it was important to me that this Rosa could look like any Rosa - yours, or mine, the next reader's - so we only see her from the back. 

Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman followed, the 'prequel' to To Kill A Mockingbird, and a job which came with the opposite problems from those of TKAM - no-one but a handful involved in its publishing was allowed to read it, no-one knew what it was about, and there were no legendary scenes or characters to draw upon - at least, not ones that hadn't aged by at least 20 years. All we could gather was that 'Scout' was now' Jean-Louise', and her relationship with Atticus was believed to be...under strain. Should I show this? Was she still a tomboy? Is Atticus frail? Would the swing still be in the garden?

I had just under 2 weeks, and there were only 3 officially-published editions - the US one, one in the UK, both done in-house, and this one, published by rare-breed literary publisher Open Books in Korea (the only publisher I know of that's also built its own Guggenheim-esque art gallery and stationery brand). So the pressure was on, and indeed Harper Lee's estate were very involved in approving every step of the cover drawing as I was a series of differently-dress 'Jean-Louises' just hours before the print deadline.

Not long after this book I was asked to work on The Ghosts of Ebenezer Creek, later re-titled Crossing Ebenezer Creek, to be published by Bloomsbury USA on May 30th this year. If I thought immersing myself in Emmett Till's story was hard enough work, the research for this one was gruelling. 

In a little-known event, large numbers of freed slaves died in 1864 as they tried to cross the Georgian Creek, having attached themselves to the Union Army's infantry in the hope of a safe, accompanied crossing. Brigadier Jefferson Davis wasn't having any of this and ordered the bridge they were crossing to be brought down; realising what was about to happen, the recently-freed slaves "hesitated briefly, impacted by a surge of pressure from the rear, then stampeded with a rush into the icy water, old and young alike, men and women and children, swimmers and non-swimmers, determined not to be left behind. In the uncontrolled, terrified crush, many quickly drowned."

Images of the panic and drowning washed through my head as I tried to sketch ideas. Many came, informed as much by the watery inks I wanted to use for this as by the story itself; it had been some time since I sent the art director as many ideas in for a book as this one.

I think I made it a little hard for her to choose an outcome, but she surprised me with her choice - this swirling, all-ink, one-take piece with virtually no digital interference was her favourite.

Moving ahead a little in time both for me and the protagonists in my various books, It All Comes Down To This moves the storytelling to 60s LA - Sophie is the new black kid in a nearly all-white neighbourhood and has a hard time finding her place in it. This another example of a book cleverly dovetailing real-life events - this time the Watts Riots - with the fictional timeline of a made-up family. Beautifully done, the book required the sort of in-depth research that went way beyond looking through 60s fonts, LA storefront colours and girls' hairstyles. 

The cover is a little less dramatic, but required a lightness of touch and a sensitive portrayal of a girl on the brink of adulthood; my initial roughs were more firmly anchored around the location and the riots, but these gave way to a gentler approach - incidentally, my first book cover completed entirely on an iPad Pro and Pencil.

My most recently published in this series is Linda Williams Jackson's sequel to Midnight Without A Moon, called A Skyful of Stars published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York. Rosa, now 13, is torn between a boy who wants to meet violence with violence and her best friend Hallelujah, who believes in peaceful protest. Struggling to see how it's all going to work together, she starts to see her place within the Civil Rights Movement and what she can do herself.

Our main character was fully formed as with Midnight, not a silhouette, allowing me to focus on her braids, expression and tired overcoat, portrayed among falling leaves and icy branches (it actually gets icy in Mississippi, who knew?) The hint of protest and threat had to be there, but with the exception of the Harper Lee titles, all of these books are Young Adult fiction, so striking the balance between off-putting menace and an inviting hint of a potentially unsettling historical context has become something of a specialism.

The book I'm currently working on for SourceBooks USA isn't completed yet - we're getting close - and continues my wave of black history-based novels. Our heroine, Ella*, tries to save a local beauty spot on the Georgian border from a corporation that wants to build right through it (sound familiar?). The losses she endures en route to saving the place preserve its existence for future generations, but once again, this isn't a fluffy read. 

*names have been changed to protect the as-yet-unreleased plot!

So, on reflection, I'm learning a lot from these books I'm tasked with illustrating; selling difficult, sometime challenging narratives to readers through covers which must walk a confident tightrope between visual appeal, intrigue and the hint of just enough darkness to do the content justice. When I worked on chick-lit - book after book of delightful, nonsense fluffy bestsellers by big-name writers - I enjoyed the prolific output, the regularity and the big rebrands of entire series of happy-ending novels, but I never really had to think all that much. I thank the authors of the books in this article for making me think, and trusting me to reach in and pencil out the contents of their heads, placing them into those of their readers.

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