The Casual Optimist Posts

The cover of the US edition of Salman Rushdie’s first adult novel in seven years. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House, September 2015), was revealed on Buzzfeed last week.1 While the cover itself is perfectly fine, the most remarkable thing about it is how much it looks like a novel for young adults.

I was immediately reminded of the cover of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, designed by Rodrigo Corral (Penguin 2012)…

…and the lovely hand-lettered YA covers of Australian designer and illustrator Allison Colpoys:

For the Forest of a Bird by Sue Saliba; design by Allison Colpoys (Penguin / January 2015)

Something in the World Called Love by Sue Saliba; design by Allison Colpoys (Penguin / August 2008)

After some further thought, however, I realised that it is even more reminiscent of the cover for the novel Waiting for Doggo by Mark B. Mills, designed by Yeti Lambregts (Headline, November 2014), which made me wonder if, perhaps, we are starting to see more adult covers that look like YA?

Since the success of Harry Potter, publishers have known that adults read ‘children’s books’ for pleasure, and they will often try to appeal these to older readers with more mature covers. On Twitter last week, American YA cover designer Erin Fitzsimmons (interviewed on the blog here), identified this as ‘crossover appeal.’ But crossover appeal can go both ways, and it seems that adult covers are being designed to reach the widest possible audience too.

This trend is more pronounced in the UK where bright and whimsical illustrated covers are common for commercial fiction. The vibrant cover of the UK edition of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (and the accompanying backlist) — beautifully illustrated by Sroop Sunar and unveiled today — is a perfect example:

According to CMYK, the Vintage Books design blog, Sunar was inspired by printed ephemera found in India around the time of Independence, and the brightly coloured covers would work equally well for YA as for adult fiction:

US publishers have (I think) been slower to market adult fiction to younger readers in this way. Although hand-lettering has become very common on US covers for a while now, photographic images still dominate commercial fiction covers. Compare, for example, the UK cover of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, illustrated by Nathan Burton (left), with US edition designed by Abby Weintraub (on the right):

From my own experience, I can also think of at least one quirky illustrated cover — for an upcoming literary novel that the publisher has very high hopes for — that was killed at the last minute in favour of a more traditional photographic one. The original design could easily have been for a gothic Young Adult fantasy. The new cover, much less ambiguous, is clearly intended for adult book clubs.

Adam by Ariel Schrag; design by Christopher Moisan (Mariner / June 2014)

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan; design by Joan Wong (Anchor / May 2014)

How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer; design by Olga Grlic (St. Martin’s Press / July 2014)

Even so, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and a few other recent covers suggest that US publishers are willing to experiment, and as audiences for YA and adult fiction become harder to differentiate, we will only see more covers that blur those lines.