Monday, October 11, 2010

Shooting Covers for Dying to Go Viral


Last Tuesday Dying to Go Viral sold to my favourite publisher in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Hurray!
After a few cover attempts failed for the Canadian publisher, my husband Bob shot the cover for Last Chance for Paris. Turned out to be my favourite cover of all time. This time I thought
I would try to give him first crack. My niece Kelly is the perfect age to play the 14 year old character Jade who dies in the first chapter when she "skitches" on a Mustang while riding her skateboard. Of course for the shoot, we couldn't have the Mustang driving. Then we'd be as stupid as the boy who attempts to capture this video for youtube in the story. So the car is parked and we hope for the designer to add the illusion of movement.

I like to get more creatively involved with my books. I'm an idea person so I can write good copy for back blurbs, I took scriptwriting for a year so I can envision and write scripts for booktrailers and I work at a magazine part time so I can think of how I'd like a cover to look at least conceptually. The actual colours and design, well really that's up to the visual professionals. But I also like to stretch creatively using the talents of my family. Traditionally publishers don't like authors to suggest or submit illustrations. And they may not like us submitting potential photos. But who knows maybe they will love it. For more photos of the skateboarding cover shots, see this url
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcnicollphotography/sets/72157625009561933/show/

6 comments:

Virvey said...

Hi Sylvia! I've just started on working on the book to translate it into Finnish, cool stuff :)

Sylvia McNicoll said...

Nice to hear from you Virvey. Stabenfeldt didn't want our covers but we still had fun creating them. Hope you like the story.

Virvey said...

I do, Sylvia, thanks for answering. There's something I'd like to ask you about Chapter 12. Becky is going to Niagara Falls with Scratch and falls asleep on the bus: "My eyelids drooped. A little while later someone shook my shoulder gently and I came to. I had been leaning on Aiden, head on his shoulder." So is she dreaming about Aiden when actually leaning on Scratch? Thanks in advance!

Virvey said...

Not Becky, Jade! Sorry about that, was just reading the blurb of the next book on my list to translate.

Sylvia McNicoll said...

You caught me Virvey. Thanks. She was leaning on Scratch not Aiden.
My email is sylvia.mcnicoll@cogeco.ca should you ever wish to contact me directly. It's very exciting to be talking to my translator.

Virvey said...

Thanks Sylvia, I'll correct to Finnish and try to get the message to other Scandinavian translators too.