Half a King Hardback cover is SLEEK! Map too!

I remember a few months back when Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King cover was released there were a few people who were unsure about it. I think the problem was that seeing a .jpg of the cover ported from Photoshop just didn’t give it justice – the images looked flat, the gradients couldn’t be appreciated and the colours didn’t quite ‘pop’.

Well, now the hardback cover has been printed and a photo of it Tweeted out by the Harper Collins Design Studio and I think it would be hard for anyone not to admire the final result. The artist, Dominic Forbes, has done a fantastic job of taking modern fantasy elements (such as the mysterious symbol, seen on the covers of series such as A Song of Ice & Fire, The Hunger Games and adult versions of the Harry Potter books) and traditional elements (a magnificent landscape and wondering characters) to make something that a reader looking for an epic fantasy is sure to pick up. Personally, I really liked the map covers, but I can see completely why Harper have moved away from them for this release. With the book being marketed to a Young Adult audience (although, having read it, I can confirm all ages will enjoy it), it makes sense to make the content of the book a little more obvious – for parents and gift buyers as much as for the younger readers buying it – and to separate it from the darker novels that came before – that probably aren’t appropriate for the younger Young Adults.

Speaking of Maps, in addition to the cover, Harper Voyager also tweeted the fantastic map that complements the book. You may remember that for years Abercrombie was ‘the guy who didn’t do maps’, his reasoning was as follows:

Talking of publishers, I was at the Gollancz Autumn Party the other night, and Editorial Director Simon Spanton was spewing venom (alright, he was being mildly irritated) on the whole subject of maps. He don’t like ‘em much. He certainly doesn’t think they’re in any way necessary. He objects to the way they’re sometimes included on a knee-jerk. He feels that books are a piece of written work and should stand on that basis without the need for often inaccurate and ugly bodges on the fly-leaf.

I agree with him, up to a point. My own feelings, often repeated and rubbed soft and thin like the material of a favourite shirt, is that maps aren’t really suitable to the type of book I write, that is one centred tightly around the characters. To use a film metaphor, I feel that epic fantasy is often told too much in wide shots, which is to say we are shown vast events from a great distance, we are shown little people in a huge landscape, we perhaps lack that feeling of closeness with, and understanding of, the characters. And there’s no wider shot than the whole world on a page, right?

Why is there one then? Well, Joe actually did include maps in his stand-alone novels too. And, I can only speculate, but I personally believe that this inclusion is for similar reasons: because the story is set on a smaller scale than The First Law trilogy and that knowing the landscape (especially when the characters are at sea in Half a King) will help the reader to an extent. This is especially true for a reader still developing their skills and ability to map out an epic scale novel as they read. That said, at the same time as the above quote, Joe also wrote that:

‘Had my publisher wanted a map, either in the UK, the US, or anywhere else, I’d happily have given them one. Even a rubbish one. It would have been a very long way from a deal-breaker, I can tell you that. But none of them have asked.’

So, perhaps I’m talking rubbish and the reasoning is as simple as the new publisher, Harper Voyager, asked him for one. Who knows? Either way, I like the map designed by Nicolette Caven. Here it (and the cover I promised) is:

Finally, you will be glad to hear that Joe likes them too (having referred to them as ‘Beautiful’ through Twitter). The book is out in all good bookshops from 3rd July 2014; you’d be mad to miss it!

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