[daringnovelist]

A bunch of things have come together lately, making me wonder if the time is right for some of my recent thoughts about illustration.

Konrath posted about how he expects books to become even more integrated with the web and communities -- kind of an eBook 2.0. Another blogger, Steve Perry, posted an illustration contest on his blog for people to illustrate one of his characters.

I've been thinking about art as personal branding -- not just covers, but kind of like James Thurber's drawings are indelibly mixed with his stories.

Which brings me to something I posted on my blog last night which I think might be a conversation starter. (This is the end of a post about N.C. Wyeth.):

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It used to be that most fiction was illustrated -- in magazines, in newspapers. Often multiple illustrations. These days, though, illustration has pretty much gone by the wayside (other than for children). Most of the time, all we have are the covers to tease and tantalize us.

And if all we have are covers, we have an extra problem in this modern age of ebooks. All you see is an itty bitty thumbnail, and even if you have a beautiful Wyeth-quality cover, the reader is unlikely to be swept up by the drama. They won't be able to see it that well.

However, I don't know if you ever noticed books from the old days, before they had a paper dust cover: even though it was the heyday of illustration, the cover itself might only have an impressed logo-like image. A crown or a ship. The really catchy dramatic illustration would be in the frontispiece inside.

In this modern age, even as cover images shrink to postage stamps, and the books themselves are text-only, we can bring back the frontispiece: by putting it on a website.

We have new opportunities now to make illustration a part of the overall online brand or identity of a book or series. The web gives us a wonderful opportunity for supplementation. I hope that people in publishing will make use of it.
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Many of us are artists and designers, at least on an amateur level. Others work with artists and are interested in art and illustration:

What do you think? Do you see more integration of images via web and social networking? Do you see it already here? Or does it seem to be hot air?

Camille

 

[daringnovelist]

Personally, I don't need illustrations in the fiction I read so it's not something I'm looking for. Some kind of web integration that provides illustrations would be meaningless to me.

It's not something I would look forward to as a writer, either. Seems like it would add expense.

I'm not saying it as something integrated as in the illustrations appear in your book. I'm talking about something much more akin to "buzz." (Also not saying it's something you'd have to do. And opportunity, not a requirement.)

In a sense we're already sort of doing it, but we're doing it in an annoying way as conscious advertising -- say a book trailer. Look at the book trailer for BLAMELESS, a fun animation about how the cover was put together, which should be of interest only to artists, but it was a viral video because it was interesting.

And Steve Perry's contest. He has a very specific idea of what his alien character will look like, so he's holding a contest for people to draw her. Whether that will be successful or not directly, it really digs into the Web 2.0 thing in that:

1.) It's interesting in and of itself.
2.) If he publishes any of the illustrations, they will add interest to his blog.
3.) Those illustrations will be there to capture interest for a very long time.

It's like baseball cards and collector figures. Or an earlier discussion here: mapping your fantasy land and having it up on the web.

This is where I think Konrath is wrong, btw -- the integration will not happen within the book. People don't like to interrupt their reading experience. It's not a social activity, but being invested in the story IS, or can be, a larger experience. It already happens in the traditional publishing world, at least in a controlled and manipulative way. And it has long been happening in the fan world -- isolated from the mainstream. That stuff is all becoming integrated into the web.

Camille

 

[daringnovelist]

I think the curiosity factor is a big one. 

Even with contemporary crime -- the webzines which do really well tend to have provocative images.  (And when I say "illustration" here, I should say that I'm using it as someone in the biz uses it -- commercial images, not specifically drawings illustrating a specific thing.  So logos and photographs count too.)

The gun, the sexy babe, the ominous silhouette standing in the backlight of a mean looking alley. There's a reason why those have appeared on covers of magazines for decades.

On a less sophisticated level: we get a great cover, which is at least legible at thumbnail level -- but very often we look for one that looks even better when bigger.  Why?  Just because somebody might click on it?  Sure, but also because we can display the image at a larger size on our website.  If the image weren't important, we could just put the title in large print -- but we don't do that, why?  Because the image is important.

The thing to remember is that we're not just limited to one, and we're not just limited to "slick" either.  At least those who are interested in images -- artists and people who work with artists.

Think about James Thurber and his cartoons -- those sold a lot of books.

(And I've got to go.  Big protests in Michigan today.  I'll be back tonight, unless we all get raptured.)

Camille

 

[daringnovelist]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Take a look at old adventure, romance, and crime fiction pulps. They often had an illustrations heading certain chapters. Not all per se, just a few sprinkled in here and there. Heck, many fantasy writers include maps and such in their works already.

Yes, that's kind of where I was coming from. Illustration used to be the norm, and not just in books. Remember that many of these stories first appeared in newspapers -- and were illustrated there. Illustrations were a way of getting people to look closer at the story. You could say that they greatly improved the "click through" rate.

And with books in the store, the map inside the cover and the frontispiece were designed to create anticipation. Before the reader even had a chance to thumb through to look at the first sentence, there was cool stuff to lead him or her on -- aside from the cover.

I liked what Konrath had to say, I just think he's so far ahead in his thinking most people can't follow him. He's not talking about the reading experience being interrupted, he's talking about the reading experience being interactive. That's a visionary statement and visionaries are usually alone until other people catch up with them.

I understand what he was talking about. And as others have said, that technology is here. But he kept emphasizing live chats for every chapter, etc. What a lot of studies have found is that a lot of multimedia feels intrusive to the reader. That is, unless they went into the experience FOR the interactivity -- i.e. they're playing a game. But for the kind of thing he's talking about to work well, you have to have the equivalent of an event. For instance, all the people who tweet with each other about TV shows. The reason that works is because they are all watching AT THE SAME TIME. It's a social event.

Now here's the thing, TV, theatrical movies, and home video are three different experiences, and what the audience wants with each is very very different. When video first came out, production houses assumed that the main customers would be the same as for theatrical movies. So they focused on things which would appeal to 18-34 year old men. And for a while they created a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But as they reached deeper and deeper into the archives, and had more and more films which did not do well at the box office available, the audience shifted. Hollywood did a study and was utterly shocked to find that women of a certain age were the biggest DVD buyers, and they liked to buy films they would never see in the theater.

When they interviewed the subjects, what they found was that the women didn't like watching certain kinds of movies in a public environment. If the movie was really personal, they LOVED the movie, but they wanted privacy. In some cases, they didn't even want to watch it with family or loved ones. They wanted, in essence, to experience the movie the way you experience a book.

The same women might still love to watch a "tentpole" blockbuster with a huge audience like everyone else. AND when the younger men were interviewed, they too were more likely to want to watch smaller more personal films in privacy.

While I am sure there will be the equivalent of a "tentpole" movie, books are the natural medium for privacy. You may want to talk about it OUTSIDE the book, but you don't need any technology to do that. We're actually already there in terms of technology. The only thing which could enhance it further is if the Kindle had a better interface for using as a web device. You don't have to switch devices when you've finished a book and want to go talk on Goodreads about it.

To bring this back to my topic -- we can create places for fans to go (our blogs or websites or FB pages) but if we create something they love, THEY'LL create that too. Which is a part of what I also see. Fans will do what they do. They will play and draw pictures and have their own fantasies about things.

While it does provide interesting opportunities -- I guess I don't think we have to be all that proactive about it. (This group tends to take everything in terms of whether it's something for the author to DO rather than just be aware of.) I just see more cool stuff in our future.

Camille