Cover blank

No cover for my short-story collection yet, though Jen at Salt, and I and John, and (as I said in my last post) our reading group, are all banging our heads for one. I used to do a lot of the illustrative photography for our short-story mag Metropolitan (under my other name Helen Johnson) and always had to make quick artistic decisions, so I was fairly confident when Jen asked me at the start if I had any ideas for the cover. The title is a spin on a phrase running through one story: Balancing on the Edge of the World, and the image which came to me was an androgynous figure poised on a curved surface, maybe a hill. However, Jen says that when they tried it out it looked like the cover for a management/spiritual/religious type textbook!!

'Ditch the figure' said Trevor in the reading group, and the general consensus there was that I should go for something abstract. I know that some people, writers in particular, prefer abstract covers because they don't artificially tie books down, but I have a feeling that browsers want, and are more attracted by, some concrete idea of the human situations behind that cover. And it's so crucial to get it right: although Doug in our reading group insists that he is immune to book covers, knowing that they can mislead (and pithily says that he's a title man himself), I think he's pretty unusual...

Oh well, back to the drawing board...