About Us \  Services & Prices  \  Shopping Cart \  Affiliates  \   Authors Only  \  Contact Us

An Interview with Art Director,

Rocky Nunez

Interviewer:  Rocky, you have designed an incredible number of book covers on such a wide variety of topics. How do you get your ideas?  Do you have to read through every manuscript?

Rocky:  Heck, no. If I did that, I would never get done.  Most of my ideas originate in conversations with the author.  When I listen to someone who is passionate about his manuscript, ideas come out of my head from a whole other dimension.  When an author meets with me, and he or she is excited about being published, that enthusiasm generally is provocative enough to open up a fountainhead of ideas.

Interviewer:  You said, “ideas” – so, how do you finally narrow it down and define the cover?

Rocky:  Listening to the author is probably the most important ingredient for me in getting my ideas for cover artwork.  From those cues, I design a mock cover, marrying up my own ideas to those I’ve gotten from the author.  Then I run the mock-up by the author and get ready to listen again.  Designing a book cover is collaborative.  I may be the art director, but my inspiration comes from listening and observing the world around me.

Interviewer:  What are the elements of a well-designed book cover?  Is there any particular style that sells?

Rocky:  The elements?  There are so many different ways of hooking someone to pick up a book. For a visual cue, you can have abstract, realism, digitally-enhanced elements, animae, clip-art, photography. Art technology provides us with so many more possibilities than were available ten or twenty years ago.  It is more about the way the elements blend together holistically, than in isolating any one element. 

Interviewer:  What about color?  Does color play a role in how well a book sells?

Rocky:  Of course, choosing a color depends a lot of what kind of mood the particular book is trying to project.  Yellows, blues, and pinks--not real pinks, but rosey hues, are easier on the eye, more visually-dynamic.  Hunter green and blood-like burgundy are harder to work with and you get less impact from those darker shades.  Unless, of course, that is the mood you are trying to convey in your visual.  Sometimes a dark cover is appropriate to the tone of the manuscript.  Dark colors say ‘serious stuff’ to me, children’s books, humor, self-help, and lighter reading usually require lighter colors to convey the mood of the book.

Interviewer:  What about text on a cover?  Is font important in cover design?

Rocky:  Yes, it is.  Text needs to balance the cover layout with whichever images are chosen.  There are also covers that are only text, as requested by the author.  On these types of covers, text not only becomes the important factor in the design of the cover, but also the image.  Text can be converted, stretched, skewed, flipped, painted over, shadowed, given special effects, etc.  I consider the text the same way I consider art.  It was designed, therefore, it is a design element, not an add-on or just type.  After all, type conveys mood too, and different fonts create different feelings in the viewer.

Interviewer:  What was your all-time favorite cover design?  And what made it great?

Rocky:  The Sentient Advantage was one of my favorites.  Unfinished Business, which is completely a graphic design, was a joy to do.  I also like Mystical Toy Guitar.  These covers embody the extremes of what cover design is about.  With The Sentient Advantage, I created a landscape of outer space from various graphic sources, which all integrate into one seamless representation of a universe that really doesn’t exist.    Mystical Toy Guitar came to me in a dream.  The guitar photograph was completely revamped and the Union Jack flag was imposed on the original photograph.  That guitar never existed, yet looks like the real thing.  Unfinished Business had so many elements from the story that I could have used on the cover.  It would have been confusing to incorporate all of them into one visual.  The story begged for a more graphic design, a little on the abstract side of the street, to unify all those elements.

Interviewer:  And the worst, not to name names?

Rocky:  There really is no bad cover, no bad art; it is all about personal taste.  Sometimes a low- resolution photograph that an author is intent on using does not reproduce as well as I’d like it to, but art really is in the eye of the beholder.  Or sometimes an author has just too many elements they want to include on their cover and the result is too busy.  When that happens, I discuss it with the author and try to narrow it down to which elements are really the most essential.  Ideally, the cover should work with the book, and for the book, as covers cannot stand on their own.

Interviewer:  So, is it true then, that you can’t tell a book by its cover?

Rocky:  A book cover shouldn’t tell so much you don’t need to read the book.  Just enough visual to seduce the reader into picking it up and reading the first page.   Cover art should be a tease, a hook, it should entice and intrigue.  The art and the text should work together to give the buyer a visual taste of what’s inside without competing for the spotlight.  The book is the star of the show, while the cover is just a supporting cast member.  Ideally, good book cover design costumes a manuscript to show off its finest features.  That’s always my goal.