Thursday, June 2, 2011

2011 APA book cover design winners

Among the children and young adult book cover winners at the 2011 Australian Publishers' Association awards, you can find:
Best designed children's cover of the year

Best designed children's fiction book


Joint winners of the best-designed children's nonfiction book


Best designed children's picture book

Best designed children's series

Best designed young adult book

Best designed secondary education book

See all the awards, adult and children's, with the authors/designers and all on Fancy Goods, the Bookseller and Publisher magazine's blog here:

It's interesting to see what gets industry awards like these; they're not always the ones the kids grab first. I'm sometimes hugely disappointed in book covers - the blurb sounds promising but the cover just ain't gonna grab the customers.  We get some great ones, but others (if I know that what's inside is worth the work) I'll do my best to hand-sell; but I can't hand-sell everything, and covers certainly matter.

One book I wish someone would re-issue with a modern, appealing cover is a teenage fiction book called, "A time to love, a time to mourn" by Paige Dixon (which I think was originally published with a title like, "Will you cross my golden river?".  It's a superb, well written family story, an unsentimental tearjerker - I still have a copy in the library, but it's a hard hard sell, so dated does the cover look.  Any publisher listening - ???

Congratulations to all those involved in the books above.

Cheers

Ruth

1 comment:

Laureen said...

Can't really see the students picking up the midnight zoo - the cover just doesn't have that "it" factor.