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And the winner is . . .

Well, in fact, I don’t know which the winner is.

The publisher will make the choice, though I will have some input.  My instinct is that it will be the lightning bolt image, though my personal preference goes back and forth depending on my mood, the amount of coffee I’ve had, and the insights and observations of you, my friends and readers.

Frankly, there isn’t a bad choice.  But, on the other hand, there isn’t a perfect choice.

Let me explain.

To the publisher, a cover has one job:  to get people to pick up the book.  It has to bark, howl, scream, whisper, seduce, and otherwise do what is necessary to get people to become curious enough to want to see what’s inside the cover.  Whether that cover has any direct relationship to the contents of the book is secondary, though not immaterial.

We authors, on the other hand, are more concerned with the steak than the sizzle.  We ask, does the cover fairly represent the content that I have labored over for so many nights and months?  We want the cover to be about the book, not just something to sell the book.

Over the years I have had some real fights with publishers where I thought their cover choices were distortive and, frankly, idiotic.  Sometimes I’ve been right and sometimes I’ve been the idiot.  But the truth is, in the end, the marketing people in the publishing house get the final say.  If the book doesn’t sell, we all go down together.  And they are the people responsible for selling the book.  So their finger is on the scale of any decision that has to do with how the book is presented to the public.

On this Lone Dog Road cover, I am lucky that New World Library has a cover designer who is both talented and conscientious.  I gave her passages from the book and told her about the characters and plot and mood.  She came up with five or six possible covers, the best two of which I put in front of you.  She was thoughtful and insightful and pretty much hit the nail on the head.

But she does, in the end, see through the publisher’s eyes, and the cover choices reflect a publisher’s prerogatives of visual evocation rather than the author’s bias toward accurate description.

Consider:

The setting of both covers is the South Dakota Badlands.  (If you haven’t ever been there, you really must go. There is nowhere quite like them.)  But the fact is, Lone Dog Road does not take place in the Badlands, though much of it takes place in terrain that has the same character.

In an earlier day, this would have bothered me.  But this is one of these details where nobody knows and nobody cares (except for a few South Dakotans, and no one in the coastal publishing worlds has cared a whit about what South Dakotans think).  The job of the cover is to evoke, not to describe.  And each of these covers evokes something of the character of the book.  I heartily concur with what she created.

The lack of a road is a different story.  I argued for an image with a road, saying it would give the cover a third dimension and be invitational rather than presentational, and that it would better reflect the title of the book.  But the consensus was that I was being too literal, and the designer couldn’t find an image that would evoke the feeling she wanted while offering an image of a road. So my one loud squawk was met with the back of the hand.

This makes me mildly grumpy.  But overall, I’m thrilled.  I have a title I love (thanks to all of you and your input, lo, those many months ago).  I have two cover choices that are visually arresting and emotionally evocative.  And I have two images that amplify rather than distort the character of the book.

Judging from your votes, which are split almost perfectly between the two covers, half of you are going to be shaking your heads at the choice when it is finally made.  Half of my head will be shaking, too.  But you’ve made your cases and you’ve made them well.  Anyone who takes the time to read the comments will see that there was an argument to be made for either option.  Truly, there’s no wrong choice just as there’s no absolute right choice.

Barack Obama famously said, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  Lone Dog Road and its cover may not be perfect, but thanks to all of you, it is going to be damn good. I haven’t been so excited about a book for years.