Despite that old adage, we all judge a book by its cover. Publishers in particular know that cover design is crucial to marketing and can influence sales if done right. Sometimes a particular cover can act as a shorthand to the contents within (pastel colours and cutesy illustration for romance; dark and earthy tones and big fonts for crime fiction).
Emilie Collyer’s debut collection of poetry, Have You Got Anything Less Domestic? was recently published by Vagabond, with the poet very involved in the cover design. ‘I had the idea to use an image that already featured, in a way, in the book. I had written three ekphrastic poems in response to photographs by Daisy Noyes, part of an extraordinary collection she made called Mother Figure: 71 Self-Portraits in Isolation. I kept circling back to one of them, titled Burning Bush.
