Saturday, January 15, 2011

[Cover Battle] The Bulgarian cover for "The Passage"

I sometimes dread, when books I'm excited about [I admit that I want to read The Passage, cause everyone else has] are translated in Bulgarian. Not so much because the translation would suck. I either read it in Bulgarian or in English [don't re-read]. I've come to terms with translated books not entirely capturing the mood of the original language. No, it's the covers that bother me. When Bulgarian publishers try to be creative and fashion a new cover for a bestseller [especially in the SFF field], the results are disastrous.

Take the newest desecration of art. I'm talking about The Passage by Justin Cronin. Look at the covers below. They look good, right? The UK cover [on the left] being superior cover, but that's irrelevant at the moment.

Look at the Bulgarian cover... Right, I will wait for the vertigo to pass.

You can see how the Bulgarian publishing house [Intense] incorporate the concepts of the two covers. They want the pretty trees [US] and some human element to it [UK], because in order for the title to be The Passage, you need a) something to pass through + b) someone to do the passing. FINE. Okay, I can live with it, but really... This looks like a half-assed draft of someone, who has amateurish [at best] Photoshop skills. Everything needs smoothing. I can SEE the pixels on the silhouette, which was so badly inserted in the trees.

AND really, look at so many things done wrong:
1) The font makes me believe that this is self-publishing
2) This ugly, ugly font just brings out the cover design's fault.
3) The logo seems so out of place that it's driving me insane.
4) The actual cover is not hardcover, nor is it the tougher softcover material. NO, they used a thicker magazine type paper that bends and wrinkles into waves. Reinforcing the idea that this is a waste of money and time.

And actually these all could have been avoided, if someone spent a bit more time on it. I think an additional 4-5 hours to smooth out the kinks would have sufficed.

1 comment:

Carl V. Anderson said...

I don't find the cover to be horrible, although I would agree the others are best. I am disappointed for you to hear that the cover material is so cheap. It does indeed give the impression that it is a throwaway book, so why should you spend your hard-earned money on that?

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