Naoise blog 4

What a weekend. We’ve had a year of terrible things happening to good people, so it’s nice to see the equation flipped. I don’t support Biden and there’s more to US politics than ‘Trump bad’, but all the same ... I was going to say 'may the wind be always at his back', but a query from Madelon caused me to look it up and realise that's not a phrase for wishing someone ill, as I'd always thought in my childhood. For some reason I pictured the wind pushing the person away from everyone, which seems a better outcome in this case. (Trump owns actual windmills in the West of Ireland. I hope they fall over and that he’s standing under them when they do.)

Festival-wise, hopefully yesterday gave people an escape from the tension leading up to the result. Last evening Crossing Border showcased the winners of the European Literature Prize for the best contemporary European novel that’s been translated into Dutch and published the previous year. To mark the award’s ten-year anniversary, 2020 had two juries, one majority-student panel who awarded Frère d'âme by David Diop and another headed by author Abdelkader Benali that chose Spring by Ali Smith. The award goes equally to the translators: Martine Woudt, Karina van Santen and Martine Vosmaer. The different results demonstrate how potently luck affects prizes. For every big win in the headlines, there was probably a close second, and others who were close seconds in their own estimations and their mother’s.

Madelon, who’s been translating these blog posts into Dutch, was curious about the different covers for my first novel in various territories, so I thought I’d explain more broadly for anyone else who’s been wondering why it differs from country to country. Publishers have printed my novel with a range of covers both in the anglosphere and in translation. They base the decision on their own identity as an imprint, and on the needs of their particular market. When one of my publishers is getting ready to print, they give a graphic designer a briefing for the jacket—nothing incredibly specific, it tends to be more a mood than a ‘Put this on it’. The designer comes back with their first mock-up, and if the publisher is happy then they send the mock-up to me and my agent for final approval. If I hate something I can say, but I’ve liked all my covers so far. That’s always a relief because having to say no is, for Irish people, the most painful situation in the human experience. It’s somewhere between getting your appendix out and open-abdominal surgery on the stressful procedure index.

Apart from veto power, I don’t give a huge amount of input on covers or any other marketing aspect, because it’s more about communicating the publisher’s vision than it is about the author’s personal leanings. In my case a few countries have gone for similar covers—in the Dutch translation they’re using a variation on my US jacket, for instance, while in Spain they’ve adapted the UK one. Each territory has a unique publishing landscape that the publisher will know best, and within that landscape each publisher will have their own ethos. This all influences the cover we end up with.

That’s it for now, really; otherwise my weekend has mostly been two flavours of screen time, catching up on work and doing whatever the opposite of doom-scrolling is. Positive endorphin scrolling? I’m glad Trump lost.