Episode Transcript: Why Are Fantasy Audiobook Covers So Bad?

This is a transcript for our episode Why Are Fantasy Audiobook Covers So Bad?

Hey everyone! This is one half of Dragon Babies, just Grace today, Grace lonesome. We aren’t going to be able to record our next episode on Half World, by Hiromi Goto, for a few weeks, so I decided that I would go ahead and investigate something that’s been tickling at me for a while now.

Y’all know that we are fascinated by fantasy book covers, and because we approach each book that we cover through a nostalgic lens, we talk about which covers really grabbed us when we were young because that was the main reason why we picked up a lot of the books that became incredibly important to us. Madeleine is a big audiobook reader – I’m getting into them bit by bit, it’s still hard for me to pay attention, somehow – but she often mentions “this audiobook cover is really wild! This cover is just not good!” And we wonder where it came from. I’ve started to become pretty fascinated by this.

This episode, I am diving into the seedy underbelly of the audiobook publishing industry and how covers are selected, designed, put together, slapped up in Photoshop over a lunch break – whatever the case may be.

I did reach out to ten audiobook publishers. Most didn’t respond; some did, but didn’t end up getting me any research. I appreciate those who took some time to try to help! But I ended up doing the research on my own, and I think you’ll be interested by what I found.

Common Problems with Audiobook Cover Design

Let’s look at about the differences between audiobook cover design and print cover design. In my mind, there are three main problems.

Proportions - Can the cover be square? Because that’s what audiobook players are going to present as the graphic accompanying an episode. With some existing print covers, it’s relatively easy to adapt them; with others, it’s not, and you get some fascinating results.
Copyright – I learned in my research process that the covers of books have a separate copyright from the text because each publisher creates its own cover. Some audiobooks, if they’re being released in audio format years after they were originally published, are not likely to have the copyright carry over so that the audiobook publisher is able to use that same cover. Hence some of the very different audiobook covers that we see that I can’t manage to find on any print editions.
Adaptability – Do they have an original art file, what kind of assets do they have access to, and what can they work with?

Case Study: The Dark is Rising Audiobook Cover

I started this investigation by looking at audiobook covers for our most recent episodes, and then at some of our favorite authors’ bodies of work overall. E.g. Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, and I paid special attention to The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, since that’s our most recent episode and the audiobook cover is pretty ridiculous. So let’s start there!

I did the majority of my audiobook cover research on Audible since that’s the largest audiobook distributor, and with the Dark is Rising sequence I saw that there were different artists and quality of overall cover design for different titles in the series. This is the case even though they’re coming from the same publisher, which is Recorded Books LLC (more on them later).

The Dark is Rising audiobook cover uses an adapted version of a print cover from a 1999 edition by Margaret K. McElderry books, which is a middle grade, children’s and teen imprint of Simon and Schuster. And in this cover, the paperback image is crudely stretched horizontally to attempt to fit the square dimensions. When whomever was doing this realized it was going to be enough to fit, they put blue bars on either side to achieve a square shape. Will looks distressed, it’s pixelated, it’s difficult to tell what’s going on, and the cover looks to be computer-drawn and have elements of the story throughout the design. It’s very busy, very confusing, looks like it’s from an early Myst game, and just isn’t going to entice a reader of any age to explore the series.

Fantasy Audiobook Cover Design Categories

I started to realize that there are categories of fantasy audiobook cover that each fits into. Here are the four categories I came across considering at the middle grade, YA and children’s fantasy published between the 70’s-mid 00’s that encompasses the books we’re discussed on the podcast:

A print edition cover being used as-is, with a plain background being added to the side to make the dimensions square. These are typically the most popular print edition – Inkheart, East, Ella Enchanted. This works. It’s fine! It doesn’t look amazing, it’s a little bit weird, but it functions, and there’s the recognition of a cover you’re familiar with.
Print covers that are awkwardly altered to include additional text or other graphic elements. Putting in the narrator, publisher, “Audible exclusive” banner, or making the art more updated in some way and seemingly better for the audiobook. Full Cast Audio is particularly guilty here – the publisher that creates full cast performances of books – so this is the case for In the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville and the Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce. There are some misguided layouts here – they come across as really cramped and busy and just odd. I also discovered another layer to this in which even more difficult original dimensions were used because the audiobooks were initially cassettes (for audiobooks that were first released in the 90’s), and the publisher has tried to make that work. That is the case for The Hero and the Crown, in which there is a very awkward picture of Aerin – her eyes are on different levels, her lips are pouty, and there’s some haze floating in from of her. I found the full image they pulled this from and it makes a lot more sense, but when you zoom in on her wonky little face it transforms the experience.
Dedicated audiobook covers that were created for these books by the audiobook publisher, and that have often been haphazardly and amateurly made. We’ll talk more about those in a minute!
Movie or TV tie-in covers. This is for something that’s had an adapted work released more recently – these are pretty bad too. I’m looking at Artemis Fowl and The Golden Compass.

Of these categories, by far the most interesting to me are the poorly made, dedicated audiobook covers – so let’s look more closely.

A Brief History of Audiobooks

First: an uninteresting, brief overview of how audiobook publishing works! There are audiobook publishers, which are the ones who get the rights to the material and record the audiobook, then there are audiobook distributors – some publishers like Audible are also distributors (dedicated Audible exclusives), but in general, the distributors are not creating their own work. So the cover for the audiobook is created by the publisher. And since each cover has its own copyright, published works from the past may not have a transferrable cover that the audiobook publisher has the rights to use.

I learned from Creative Law Center – they have some great resources on book cover copyright – typically, the ownership of the cover art is controlled by an interplay between copyright and contract law. So traditionally, authors have their publishing house create the cover art. It’s possible that the cover art could be created using original work that is created entirely by the artist, or the cover could be created using stock imagery that’s been licensed from a third party, like iStock or Getty Images. So clearly, this is getting pretty complicated – and I’m starting to understand why audiobook publishers go ahead and make their own covers.

From there, I turned to looking closer at the audiobook producers. It got to a point where I could open up an Audible cover for a book we’ve discussed and immediately know whether it was made by a certain publisher – and that is Recorded Books LLC. In the specific niche that we are podding in, there are only a few publishers responsible for these works, especially because capitalism continues to condense wealth and ownership and Big Audiobook really only has a few players holding the reins at this point.

The Crimes of Recorded Books LLC

Recorded Books LLC has been committing some particularly bad crimes against Diana Wynne Jones and Robin McKinley, as I mentioned earlier. They seem like they are invested in both pandering to whomever they see as the intended demographic for the book, and then also putting in as little effort as possible, so we get a super childish cover for Charmed Life, an anime-looking cover for Howl’s that I’m sure is hoping to capitalize on the Ghibli movie, and a sexy teen cover for Beauty by Robin McKinley featuring a woman’s mouth with a rose laid across her porcelain skin.

I also found another pretty bad perpetrator called Tantor Audio, then learned that they’re a subsidiary of Recorded Books LLC! The call is coming from inside the building!

I will say, their covers have a big more effort and budget put into them. They do have a full-on romance novel Fire and Hemlock edition – a girl laying in grass with thought pearls containing key plot objects from the book floating around her head. So there are some low points, but overall they’re an improvement on Recorded Books LLC’s output – their Dark Lord of Derkholm cover is pretty cool and is original art that was clearly made by someone who I believe read the book, and you know that’s a big crux here at Dragon Babies – when we can tell whether the artist has read the book or not, or at least been given some salient plot elements before just thinking about what market they’re trying to appeal to the most on a publishing level. So overall, Tantor clearly put more budget into it and I think it comes down to artistic differences between myself and the publisher rather than overall effort, because they’re not choices I would make, but they’re fine.

On the better end, just to add some positivity, are Penguin Audio and Harper Audio – I saw some beautiful audiobook covers they’d clearly made just for those editions. Some high points for me were Hogfather, which has a gorgeous Christmas wrapping paper design around the border, bright colors, a sleigh in the center – it feels silly and Christmasy and a little dark, and works really well. Also Stardust by Neil Gaiman, which has a sparse but lovely watercolor of the moon against a very fluid, multi-toned sky on a grey backdrop and it feels very evocative.

So – Recorded Books LLC is the culprit. But who are they, and what do they want?

They are a component of RB Media, which is an audiobook publishing company with global markets. It claims to be the largest audiobook publisher in the world. There is a great New Yorker piece called The Pleasures of Being Read to by John Colapinto, and from there I learned a little bit about the history of audiobooks, which actually began with Recorded Books Media. It was the brainchild of Henry Trentman, who was a traveling salesman and spent so much time in his car on the road and didn’t want to just listen to the radio the whole time, and desperately wanted to read. He looked for actors, put up a casting call at a theater in DC, and found an actor named Frank Mueller who recorded Jack London’s Sea Wolf because they were only adapting books that were in the public domain so that they didn’t need to worry about copyright. Trentman later said that when he got Mueller in a booth and heard what he could do with a book and a microphone, “I knew I had a business.”

This was in 1979, and it actually took a little longer for Recorded Books as a company to catch on because people were wary of audiobooks because they thought they were for the blind – the first audiobooks were actually an initiative of the American Institute for the Blind all the way back in the 1930’s – so Henry Trentman came along at the right time because at that point, it was the mid-80’s, so people were moving to the suburbs and people were discovering atrocious commutes and finding audiobooks to make them just a little bit better.

Recorded Books has been around since the beginning – they clearly know what they’re doing. When it comes down to it, the conclusion is a sad one – it’s that they’re just not putting budget or time into these covers. The art department, I imagine, is much less equipped than with one of the big publishing houses, or even a smaller publisher who focuses on print editions, because most of these publishers are dedicated to audiobooks and they don’t have to worry about print. They’re trying to get these digital files to the distributors as quickly and smoothly as possible so that they can begin to profit. I also wonder whether it’s related to the publishing industry being a bit of a dinosaur and moving slowly, so many publishers aren’t eager to pick up on new initiatives for digital objects and really focus on the resources necessary to create beautiful audiobook covers when they don’t have the copyright to another cover version.

Some of these are just shameful. They were clearly made in less than an afternoon using a hodgepodge of existing illustrations or stock photos. The ones with original art are a bit better, but they just look like they were made by someone handing them in as a class project.

The thing is, I start to feel cruel when I repeat that these are bad over and over again. The covers are fine, but clearly that’s all that the publishers are going for – being fine. And I’m not satisfied with that, and I really do feel that even though browsing for audiobooks is much less tactile than looking at books in a bookstore or a library, the cover design feels almost more crucial because it’s the only visual element that you have that’s connecting you to that book, so it feels like it should have even more focus put on it.

I’m talking myself in circles. I think the only way to really discover for myself how easy or difficult it is to make an audiobook cover is to actually design one.

Attempting to Design My Own Audiobook Cover - And Spiralling

Okay – which book am I designing a cover for? I’m going to choose our most recent episode, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, both because the book is fresh in my mind and made a big impact, and also because the existing audiobook cover is, respectfully, trash, so we need a replacement. I looked up some advice for designing audiobook covers. I was told to choose captivating typography, and engaging color palette, images that give just a glimpse of plot details to intrigue readers, and from my perspective, the most important part is making sure the image and text are easy to read and comprehend when looking at them on a phone screen.

I do have a design background – I own a marketing agency that does web design and marketing for small businesses, so I already have some tools at my disposal and know how to use Photoshop, so I do have those abilities on my side. The first thing I have to decide is whether I’m making my own graphic elements – whether I’m going to draw some kind of illustration – or whether I’m going to purchase licenses for photos or illustrations that already exist and use those to design the cover. Going into this, I do want to approach this not exactly like I’m a Recorded Books LLC art department designer, but I do want to aim to do this in a relatively efficient way so that I can emulate the experiences of these audiobook cover creators (whomever they make be; they would not reveal themselves to me).

My first idea, I would have to illustrate and spend a lot of time on, so I’m not going to do it. That idea would be to have a black cover with an illuminated skylight as in Will’s attic bedroom, with a crow peeking around the cover, and then a boy’s outline in the opposite corner in bed, looking up at the crow in the middle of the night. I need to say goodbye to that idea because I’m not going to do it!

Other ideas. I definitely like the concept of using a Celtic cross to evoke one of the signs, and then behind that, using some kind of stormy or wintry sky, both because that’s literally the weather throughout the book (the snowstorm that just won’t end followed by the thunderstorm that just won’t end), and because that suggests the concept of darkness rising – giving it a natural feel. I have access to some stock photo repositories through my business that I have plans with, so I’m starting there.

My Stream of Consciousness Design Process:

First, I’m heading to Depositphotos.com and looking up stormy skies and Celtic crosses. (The funniest part of this is going to be my team using logging onto Depositphotos, seeing the history and wondering “who’s doing this and why??”).
I found a nice cross, but I’m realizing that just using one of these landscape images of a grave cross – looks to be an ancient graveyard in Ireland – is going to look pretty basic. So I’m starting to think that what I’d like to do is make my own Sign – a symbol of a Celtic cross – and then use this grave as the texture and background for the sign. It has some nice moss. And then I’ll pull different images for the sky.
I’ve got my sky images now – I found one with appropriately angry, swirling clouds. Now I’ll start working on my cross in Photoshop.
I feel like my cross looks bad?? I made it very clean… I’m starting to get anxious about this and wondering if I can actually do this! I’m feeling bad about everything I said about these audiobook designers! But I think I just have to press on. So maybe this will still work somehow?
I am currently throwing every adjustment Photoshop has to offer on top of my cross to make it look not dumb… it also kind of looks like a steering wheel… and I’m just realizing that now I have to think about the typography which is historically something I struggle with in design.
I think I’ve spent a total – all told, just to be fully transparent – of about 2.5 hours on this design. So is that, realistically, too much time to expect Recorded Books LLC to spend on a design? I’m not sure. Or is that not long enough? Another perspective to consider – copyright. I have a standard license for both of the images that I used in my design, so it’s pretty much going to be allowed anywhere, in any number, digitally and commercially, and I can only create up to 500,000 print copies, but this is an audiobook cover, so this isn’t something that these publishers (or I) need to worry about. So I’m all set on my copyright clearance.
I’ve had to throw a ton of adjustments on everything in my design – the background, the center cross. I also don’t want the cross to look like it’s from – this was a burn I issued earlier for another cover – an early Myst game. It looks kind of goofy, I put a little bit of an outer glow on it to try to help it stand out because it was laying really flat on the page; I embossed it, it’s got texture, maybe it’s too much but I can’t really see it anymore because I’ve looked at my stone cross so long that it no longer exists to me as an objective entity. It’s just burned into my brain, so there’s no going back and I’m going to move on.
I found it really challenging to get all the text I needed in the image in place, and not overcrowd it. I have “Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising Sequence,” then the title – “The Dark is Rising,” (really confusing with the second book) – and then “Narrated by Alex Jennings.” I don’t have the Newberry Honor medal – that seemed to be on the audiobook covers for Newberry winners in general, and I understand why because you want prospective readers to know that your book is award-winning – but there is no way I could put it on and not have it look absolutely atrocious, so I’m skipping that.

I do feel humbled. This has been tough, I’ve been thinking about this for days, and I’m not totally happy with it. I am happy in the sense that I think this could actually be an audiobook cover. If I saw this in Audible, I wouldn’t be upset, and I would accept that it was real. At the same time, I wouldn’t think that it is the best possible representation of the book. It’s very simple, and the sign looks a little bit goofy. So I guess I’ve been knocked off my high and mighty pedestal, but I can still say that it’s better than the Recorded Books LLC cover.

The final result:

I think I’ll have to take some time and actually execute my best idea and explore that cover – make the full illustration and follow through on it – and essentially take a more traditional publishing route to my audiobook cover.

Does Audiobook Cover Design Matter, Anyway?

Other than my humbling, what lessons have we learned today? I will say that audiobooks deserve more respect in general, I’m realizing that more and more by the day; they’re super valuable for their accessibility and many other reasons. I do ultimately believe that their visuals are even more important than for a print edition. You need that visual connection to the book, and something to humanize it when it’s not a tangible object that you’re holding and you can’t flip through and get an idea. All you have is that cover image, and it just deserves more time and respect. I’d love to see your Dark is Rising cover ideas, send them to me and maybe we can work together and come up with something!

All visuals mentioned are on our website, Instagram and Twitter. Share constructive criticism and maybe we can figure out how to tweak the design without going in full, “I am dedicating myself to this perfect illustration and execution” direction. See yourself as a beleaguered Recorded Books LLC art director, and think about what path you might take.

Thank you so much for listening, I am going to be doing more of these episodes in the months to come whenever we can’t get together for a full episode, so if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them. I have some too, and my research for this episode really got me excited to do more of these projects. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

I’m Grace, until next time.