A Novel Cover Up is a semi-regular feature that looks at how covers are made. I have been fortunate enough to interview book jacket designer Tom Sanderson about how he designed the cover for One Seriously Messed-Up Weekend in the Otherwise Un-Messed-Up Life of Jack Samsonite by Tom Clempson, the second book in the Jack Samsonite series. Except for the final covers and the movie poster, all images in this post are copyrighted to Tom Sanderson and used with permission, and can be clicked to enlarge.
Can you tell us about the cover for OSMUWeekend? What do you hope it tells readers about the story?This is Tom Clempson’s second book about Jack Samsonite. I designed the first cover about 18 months ago for Atom. The new cover very much follows the style of the first book, it is meant to look quite doodley and graphic. As you can see the book has a very long title so the cover had to have a very typographic approach. The books have elements of Adrian Mole and The Inbetweeners, and the cover needed to reflect this and be contemporary and look cool, so a hand drawn approach was the right way to go with it.
