Pixiq

With my latest book – Exploring Natural China – just published, I have been busy doing radio interviews and one of the questions prompted this post: How did a panda in a snowstorm end up on the cover? Book jackets are crucial to the success or failure of a book, for if it does not motivate a potential book buyer to open it in under a second, the jacket has failed.

10 Points Towards a Successful Cover Image

1. Simple and uncluttered

2. Arresting

3. Harmonious color range or complementary tones

4. Original concept

5. Negative space (usually at top) for title plus space for author's name

6. Image + title that immediately conveys the content

7. Motivates viewer to look inside

8. Stands out across the isle of a shop

9. Works when reproduced as a thumbnail in a review

10. Striking spine image makes it stand out from lacklustre spines

There were great debates about the cover image for my China book. With an HSBC ad running in the UK, the publishers were keen to have a cormorant fisherman on the famed Lijiang (Li River) - until I pointed out a similar shot was already on another Chinese wildlife book and the birds are not wild. No animal in China is better known than a panda, but we wanted to avoid using a shot of one munching bamboo and finally opted for a panda chilling out in a snowstorm. The simple, uncluttered frame-filling design of China's most iconic animal draws the eye across a bookshop. It also works well when reproduced as thumbnail for a book review. The designer's choice of green for Natural and red for China ensure the title stands out well against the panda's black fur.

An awake panda with swirling snow makes the point that unlike brown bears, pandas do not hibernate. Bears build up their food reserves by feasting on fish and fruits in the autumn: not so pandas, which munch bamboo day in day out; yet fail to lay down winter food reserves to allow them to hibernate.

When producing a book devoted to a single species, the choice of images is more limited, but the above criteria still apply. With many hundreds of puffin shots (mostly taken Iceland, the puffin capital of the world) I still wanted to spend time working on a jacket image for a monograph on Puffins. An uninhabited island off the Isle of Mull in Scotland seemed ideal and I arranged for a boatman to drop me off and pick me up late in the evening. When I arrived, the puffins were at sea fishing, so I was glad I had packed macro and wide-angle lenses for the wildflowers. By late afternoon, persistent rain had set in as the puffins returned with raindrops decorating the black heads like silver pearls. Suddenly I visualized the head-on shot. The only snag was that puffins rarely stand still; instead, they are constantly moving their heads from side to side looking out for aerial predators. Since I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, I sat down with my tripod close to the ground and a 200-400mm lens on a Nikon D2x waiting for a puffin to look straight into my lens. Ninety minutes later, I had the shot.

By contrast, the Living Dinosuars jacket was a grab shot. Whilst working with a reptile collection at Alice Springs in Australia, I happened to walk past a large tank with a large saltwater croc lying motionless on the bottom. Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed some movement, twisted round with a camera in my hand and fired off three shots, not really expecting they would be keepers. Two were not but the third made a lively jacket.

Links

• Heather Angel's books on Amazon.com
• Heather Angel's books on Amazon.co.uk