I learned an interesting data point about the new paperback edition of my short story collection These Words Are Haunted from Fantastic Books publisher Ian Randal Strock, who was selling copies of same at Readercon as well as my science fiction collection What We Still Talk About.
According to Ian, people walking by his table would be attracted to the cover of These Words Are Haunted and pause to pick it up—those monstrous green letters really pop, don’t they?—only to then put it down again and instead buy a copy of What We Still Talk About. By the time the con was over, he’d sold only a single copy of the former, but he’d sold out of the latter!
This does not totally disappoint me. The cover did its job, getting copies of the book into the hands of potential readers. That this time around, those potential readers were more interested in science fiction than horror doesn’t mean it wasn’t a success. A sale is a sale. At a different sort of convention, those figures will likely be reversed.
Coincidentally, while I was at Readercon, I received a photo from the artist who’d provided the zombie font which appeared on the cover of the book as part of Chris Kalb’s final design—Memo Angeles.
Memo lives in Veracruz, Mexico, and I worried that the copy I’d sent him might not survive the vagaries of international mail, but as you can see, it did. Noting Memo’s expression as he holds the book, however, I’m not entire sure he did!