(updated April 2025) You shouldn’t do that, right? But we do, otherwise we wouldn’t need to be warned not to…
If you are writing a book, you will at some time have to make a decision about the cover. Having only previously published academic books, my foray into the world of trade books has given me an entirely different experience here. For academic books, you may be invited to suggest an image, or the publisher may decide for you. You are unlikely to get lots of colours, or gold lettering, or an artist commissioned to work on it all.
Trade books are different. My book with Profile Books/Wellcome Collection is out today. When the cover first became a topic, Profile gave me a range of suggestions with the main choice being between an ‘insides of the body but arty’ theme or a ‘slices of body from the outside hinting at the four sections of the book’ theme. It was difficult to decide. I took advice from someone I know who was running a bookshop at the time, as well as going with my own reactions.
We ended up with a lovely collection of internal organs interwoven with clitoris flowers, on a red background and with gold (= ‘classy’) title.
Somewhere down the line, it turned out that the red which looked so lovely on a screen didn’t work so well on paper. So the red theme changed to blue and the font for the title became more ‘modern’, to hint at the point that this book isn’t only about history, but is arguing that we need to understand history if we are ever going to change our own society. The clitoris flowers remained intact!
The US/Canada edition came out in January 2025. The publishers, Basic Books, went for a different subtitle and used the horizontal bands theme to emphasise that. It’s impossible to produce an image that shows the four parts discussed – breasts, clitoris, hymen, womb – because three of them are not visible from the outside, but the basic message is clear.
Having two editions is confusing to someone who hasn’t been in the trade books world before. There are differences in terms of the number of illustrations (the UK edition has colour plates, too) and how the references are done. Profile were clear from the start that writing a trade book didn’t let me off the hook; everything needed to be referenced, so readers would be reassured that I wasn’t making all this up! That means endnotes, which academics hate, but in trade books the assumption is that most readers won’t be checking back and forth between text and notes, maybe only going to the notes occasionally when they are wondering just what the basis for a particular claim may be.
And then there’s an extra bonus version – the audiobook! I tend to be someone who prefers to read rather than to listen, which again may be an academic thing as I want to look back to see where I’ve come from. So this was all new to me. Profile suggested some names of potential readers, and I listened to samples and asked friends and family who prefer audiobooks to text to give me their feedback. I’ve now been able to listen to the audiobook, and I am thrilled by the way the brilliant Elaine Claxton reads it. She totally gets when I am having a wry moment, or an angry moment, and it’s all there in her voice. Through her voice, you can hear my eyebrow raising quizzically. 15 hours, unabridged. I’m very excited that the book is available in this form as well!
The next stage along is the UK paperback, which is going with the four horizontal band scheme, but in a different colour combination. It comes out in June 2025 but I now have advance copies. I am hoping this will reach a whole new audience of readers!
Mistaking histories 
1 thought on “Judging a book by its cover”