Western covers, that is. Like other genres, this one has it’s own codes. This last Thursday I had the chance to get an insight into it along with JL Curtis and Lawdog, live, and recorded. Now you can be amused and educated right along with us. (fair warning: these livestreams contain a lot of silliness, occasional salty language, and more than a modicum of thread drift!)
So there you go, an hour of three authors talking about current events, book covers, and um, yeah, there’s a squirrel… (if you want to skip the silly, start at the 20:00 mark). If you want to see Lawdog go all eye-twitchy, look at the 30:41 mark. But I recommend starting at twenty minutes in for the book cover talk alone, and that’ll run for about forty minutes.
I’m sharing the covers here, for your edification. The chat had some fun during the discussion, so you may enjoy reading along as well.
I’d picked up these at a big used book sale (paid $1 each for them, inflation ough!) with an eye to talking covers, ringers, and color theory with the guys.
And a closeup of the covers the guys talked about most, coming back to them for a couple of reasons.
The Three Moms of the Apocalypse did a two-part video conversation about romance covers, which was equal parts hilarious and educational. I think I’ve shared that here before. We are currently planning to do similar videos with different genres of books to get even more information on what works – and what doesn’t – on a book cover.
This is more than a little like watching a panel at a convention, only even more free-flowing a conversation on color theory, reader expectations, and the death of a genre.
What genres would you most like to see us take on?
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Wild Wild West”
The Black Mountain is a really good (if very muddy 1970s) cover. It’s also one of the better (and least formulaic) Nero Wolfe books. Not sure I can justify calling it a “western” cover, though, despite the fact that Archie and Nero do, in fact, sleep under the stars and rough it in that one.
it was in the boxes of Westerns at the book sale – I certainly wouldn’t call it a Western, but the colors flow with the genre. Plus, I deliberately threw in some ringers here to make it fun and interesting.
Fair, but it kind of *is* the closest to a western the series gets (even including *Death of a Dude*) in terms of the characters having to deal with the elements and nature.
Yeah, was gonna say–the Nero Wolfe one HAD to be a ringer!! The cover does code western (as does the title).
I was sad to hear that westerns got ruined as a genre for First Reader. And everyone I guess. This lesson also got emphasized in a mad genius post. Don’t have your readers expecting doughnuts and feed them broccoli. Well never feed anyone broccoli but that’s a separate rant.
There is hope! He’s reading a lot of Indie Westerns now, so the genre still lives.
Still haven’t watched the stream, but I have insider info on the death of the western as a tradpub genre from the late Richard Wheeler, who managed to keep publishing westerns (and novels that were not westerns, but set in the west, like one about a vaudeville troupe traveling the west in the 1880s) right up until his passing from old age in 2019.
I’ll fill in anything that seems not to be covered once I watch it, but Wheeler’s main point was that publishing in the 1980s was taken over by MBAs and graduates of a small set of universities (he never explicitly said “Ivy League”, but it’s more or less true), who took over the jobs of, for examples, editors who had started in the pulps and had no degrees at all, but who did know how to edit, which their replacements did not. The people making decisions at the publishing houses stopped being people who loved or even liked the genre, and became people who never read it, and found it low class and embarrassing. (He pointed to the example of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a great western, which was not published as a western. The publisher promoted it as “a novel of the west”, and avoided calling it a western on the dust jacket and in all marketing materials, because in their minds, it was a Novel, and Important Literature, and therefore could not be a western.)
One of the effects of this discarding of institutional memory was that westerns stopped being marketed in the way that worked for westerns — regional and local marketing and book placement in rural and western areas where the books actually sold. Instead, the genius MBAs tried to market them like every other book, because books are widgets, and MBAs are Very Very Smart at marketing widgets. So, when westerns did not sell with this Very Very Smart plan, it meant that “nobody” read westerns anymore.
This lead to truly stupid (and misleading) marketing of the few western novels that did get published, making them all look exactly the same. Moody painting of an 1880s cowboy on the cover, and a “cool” title, regardless of content. Which is what happened with one of Wheeler’s novels I particularly enjoyed. From Hell To Midnight has that title, and the cowboy cover, and it’s not an action story at all, and has no cowboys as major characters. It’s a mining camp story, and a farce.
In short, the western was an early casualty of the Expert Class declaring themselves smarter than their customers, then blaming the customers when nobody bought their bushwah.
Same thing happened in Hollywood. “Silverado” was considered a guaranteed flop because “no one makes Westerns anymore.
Westerns are my preferred writing genre. Maybe I should find something else instead. After all, wouldn’t want to go against the big brain MBAs.
Westerns and other disdained genres are why indie exists. Supply the market with what it wants, not with what the sorority chick MBAs think it should want.
Well, MBA/expert class type thinkers can probably also catastrophically fail when it comes to marketing widgets, and/or expertise.
The department of state recently publsihed a reprot that they had paid people to prepare. Allegedly, it is a survey of AI developers, asserting that humanity is doomed unless AI developers are paid even more money to prevent AI from developing magical abilities, adn cursing humanity to death. (1)
Well, that could merely be a monkeyed ‘survey’, or sampling a group thoroughly contaminated with results fo a deliberate propaganda push.
In my eyes, it looks a lot liek a bunch of technologists who are also mystics of feuding approaches, and who have magnificently failed when it comes to marketing to people not already deeply invested.
I dunno. It is also remotely possible that I am deeply and profoundly allergic to successfully marketing myself in any way shape or form. 😀
(1) Okay, I pretty sure it actually does say ‘alignment’, and people may take issue with my jesting summary. (2)
(2) I also do not for a moment doubt that the report is anything other than political motivated information warfare. (3)
(3) Neural net marketing is only the most notable and immediate example that I can succinctly point to. I have many opinions on examples. Perhaps I am even both correct, and on topic.
so looking at the covers…
you know the situation is dire when he doesnt have a horse
just a guess
The covers to Silver Heels and Action at Three Peaks seem to come out of the same tradition as this style of movie credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccafOf4O6Q
In terms of other genres, boy, it’s hard to know what to ask for. I look at gaslamp fantasy and steampunk – the subgenres I’m currently writing in – and the results are all over the place. Space Opera, the last genre I wrote in was one of the easiest to come up with covers for: space battle/space chase, appropriate background, sleek yellow landing somewhere between Star Wars and Star Trek, done.
I’ll be reviewing a Western next Sunday. Oddly it isn’t either tradpub or indie. It is published by a small house that is part of the Texas A&M Press Consortium (Stoney Creek Press). In other words, associated with a university press.
University presses seem to occupy a place between trad and indie. I also see several Westerns every year in the TAMU Press Consortium catalog, likely because we are talking Texas universities and organizations.
That, and 1) they sell, 2) some departments accept novels-in-the-field as publications for tenure and promotion. U of New Mexico is also one of those, if you look at some of the novels published by their university press. Those tend to be literary novels set in the West, as opposed to genre Westerns.