This is the final version of the cover of my first book, Dark Days, designed by P. R. Brown of Bau-Da Design Lab, and I am pretty pleased with it. There are several differences between the final version and the working cover that was (and as of this writing still is) up on amazon.com. The working cover was designed by my publishing company’s art department so that there could be a place holder for preorders of the book- as we live in an increasingly visual culture, apparently people need something to look at when they are considering preordering something, even an unfinished book. And the book selling business seems to have gone the way of the record business: preorders are of prime importance in determining how much coverage (and thus placement in retail outlets, leading to increased total sales) the book gets. The working cover was fine as a place holder, but I am pleased my management suggested P.R. Brown as a designer for my final cover; he’s done book covers for Motley Crüe, Marilyn Manson, Nikki Sixx, and my buddy Corey Taylor of Slipknot fame. I dig his aesthetic, and I think he did a good job.
Soon after I had signed a contract with my U.S. publisher, DaCapo books, we began kicking around concepts for cover designs- in the end, I had to bend a bit on a few things, but the people at DaCapo were cool enough to bend on a few things as well. This is how a good relationship works in any sort of creative endeavor where two or more parties are involved in releasing an artistic product; a bit of give and take so that the folks on the business side of things feel comfortable that there will be a return on their investment, and the artist feels that his or her vision isn’t compromised or tarnished. I honestly feel pretty good about the middle ground Da Capo and I have managed to reach; in fact I really feel pretty darn lucky, as I have learned during this process that a lot of writers, including many, many multi-million copy best selling authors, have absolutely zero control of what the cover of their books look like (Anne Rice being just one example). That seems completely insane to me- you spend years of your life working on a book, turn it in to a publisher, then they arbitrarily pick someone who has no emotional attachment to the work at all to sum it up visually. My bandmates and I would never ever ever in a million bazillion years allow that to happen with the album cover of a record we turned into our label, so why would I do that with my book? Well, because (as I found out after doing some research) apparently that’s just the way the cookie crumbles in the book publishing world. The old saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover” makes even more sense to me now, and in a completely literal context. J.D. Salinger himself, one of America’s most revered writers, absolutely loathed the cover of the first paperback edition of his most beloved book, The Catcher in the Rye, and it wasn’t until he switched publishers from New American Library to Bantam Press (seven long Salinger-irritating years after the book was first published), that the iconic plain yellow lettering on a red background that we are all so familiar with came into being.
DaCapo worked with me and what I wanted for my book cover, so overall, I really do feel pretty lucky. But I did bend on some things, and so did DaCapo. What were those things? For this week’s blogpost, we’ll start at the beginning:
#1. My photograph being on the cover of the book. I absolutely did not want the design of my book cover to include a photograph of myself. I’m not the ugliest dude in the world, but I’m certainly not the prettiest, so my good looks alone aren’t going to put Dark Days on the NY Times best seller list. It’s not like any members of the lonely-housewife-romance-novel-reading-demographic would suddenly get heart palpitations and then plunk down their cash after seeing my mug staring up at them from the Barnes and Noble bookshelf. But looks really had nothing to do with it- I could look like Brad Pitt, and I still wouldn’t want my photo on the cover. (Brad Pitt, by the way, is who I always used to say I would want to play me in the movie they are undoubtably going to make about my life one day. Now I want Morgan Freeman, because he’s got the best voice in the world. I realize the whole race and age thing might be slightly problematic for some viewers, but Hollywood is a magical place, and we live in fairly liberal times; so DreamWorks… make it happen!) No, I didn’t want my photo on the cover of the book because I think it will date the book. I tend to think about good book covers the way I think about album covers- they should be timeless.
For example, in twenty years, no one will care about lamb of god, especially not me. Okay, that’s not true- I think a few people will still be listening to lamb of god’s music in twenty years (after all, we have been around twenty-one years already and folks still listen to the old stuff), but I sure as hell won’t be on tour or making new LOG records. I’d rather chew glass than still be doing that band in twenty years. No one wants to see a sixty-four year old Randy creaking and croaking around the stage, but I’m sure some people will still give our old records a spin every now and then. And when they pull that record out, what will they not see on any of our album covers?
A photo of the band.
Band photos used as an album cover immediately date the crap out of that album; just think about how utterly ridiculous some 1980’s hair metal band album covers look. Completely stuck forever in that unfortunate, unfortunate era, never to escape. Frozen androgynously in time by a heavy mist of hairspray and way-too-tight sexually ambiguous clothing. I don’t want my band’s record covers to not hold up twenty years from now. And twenty years from now, just like with my band’s records, I hope that someone will pick up my book at a garage sale or whatever and read that thing. The story will absolutely still hold up twenty years from now, but very few people will remember what I look like. Far in the future, some young turk will look at the cover, see my face, and go “Ewwww… man, they sure did make ‘em ugly back then!” This is also why Dark Days contains virtually no references to any current cultural icons (unless necessary to drive the story, and then I very briefly explain who they are), or mentions of specific current internet technology (like social media site names). In fact, in twenty years, everything that is now popular or even cutting edge will be considered completely archaic, and kids won’t even know what Facebook or twitter or an iPad or any of that stuff is. But prisons will exist, you can bet your sweet ass on that, which is why I wanted the cover simply to be a black and white photograph I took of the prison I was in. The viability of that image will still hold strong in twenty years- hell, the prison itself had lasted 123 years by the time I got locked up.
However, a book publishing company’s marketing department is not concerned with what is going to be happening with a book in twenty years. They are concerned with what is going to be happening with a book when it comes out, and in the case of my book, that’s pretty damn soon- July 14, 2015. Publishing houses are not art charities- they want people to buy their books, not admire the timelessness of their covers. And I am currently best known for being the singer of a fairly high profile metal band, not as an author (yet), so it makes sense to me that some metalhead might look at the cover of my book while they are cruising the bookstore or poking around Amazon.com and go “Oooooh… that’s that crazy drunk dude I saw at Ozzfest ‘04! Damn, I didn’t know he could read and write!”, then decide on a whim to pick up my book. So I caved pretty quickly on that issue- I don’t like having my photo on the cover of Dark Days, but thems the breaks, kids. At least I retained enough artistic control to take the photo myself.
I despise “selfies”. In fact, these days when fans ask me “Can we take a selfie?” I reply “No. No, we cannot take a 'selfie’. We can certainly take a photo though, so hand the phone to your girlfriend and get her to take the picture.” Fuck “selfies”, and fuck the fact that “selfie” was named the Oxford Dictionary International Word of the Year for 2013. It’s an utter embarrassment to literate people everywhere that the most revered repository of our holy English language would stoop to include the word, period; and it says something horrific about the era we live in- vain and self-centered to the extreme. Go fuck yourselfie, how about that? However, there is a world of difference between a decent self-portrait and a….grrrrrrr…..“selfie”.
In order to take the self-portrait you see on the cover of my book, I put my Fujifilm X-E2 on a tripod. I attached a shutter button remote to the camera. I sat down in my office in front of the camera. Then I turned on some far-right wing talk radio and started hitting the button every few seconds.
“Well, Fred, did you know that a few years ago President Barrack Obama took the time to sign into law a bill called the Shark Conservation Act? Apparently the Chinese like to make a soup out of the shark fins. Good 'ol Barrack, instead of being worried about lowering our taxes, fixing up our economy, and making sure we have a strong military, wants to deprive some Chinaman of his favorite dinner? 'Muricah is falling to pieces and he’s gonna waste time on a crusade to save the sharks! Well, pardon me if I don’t feel sorry for a gigantic man-eating cold blooded killer of the seas! Ain’t Barrack ever seen JAWS? Haw haw haw…”
That was, I shit you not, what was playing on the radio as I took about three hundred pictures. Looking at the pictures on my computer, at first the photos are really self-conscious looking, but as I got madder and madder at the baboons on the radio, you can see my face relaxing into a (regrettably) fairly normal state of being: one of complete disgust and disbelief at the idiocy of some people. These bozos may have made me mad (in all fairness, they sounded too stupid to realize that once the top predators of the sea are all gone, then the entire ecosystem of the ocean will be basically destroyed. Once the ocean dies, we die), but at least they helped me get an honestly disturbed look on my face- I was mashing that camera remote button so hard by the end that I’m surprised I didn’t break it. I wanted an unselfconscious photo, and I got one. Then I went surfing to calm down, and I wasn’t worried about sharks either.
The photo of the prison P.R. Brown superimposed my face on was taken by me when I went back there one day during my trial. Maybe one day, if the book stays in print long enough, my face will be removed from the cover and it will be just the prison, the way I originally wanted it to be. But until then, I’m happy enough with the cover as is. I’m a reasonable man (sometimes), and I know that if you give a little, you get a little.
At least I didn’t get the Salinger treatment.
Next post: #2- The Dreaded Papyrus Font
Dark Days will be released July 14, 2015 by Perseus/DaCapo Books in North America, and Random House Books in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. You can preorder it here: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Days-My-Tribulations-Trials/dp/0306823144/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428981491&sr=8-1&keywords=Randy+Blythe
If you want to see the photo of Pankrác Prison without my face on it, stop by my first photography gallery showing, May 2, 2015, in Soho, NYC. Go to www.sacredgallerynyc.com for details.













