Cue the Fanfare: 30 Covers, 30 Days Time!
Big news, one and all! Big, huge, epic, and life-changing news!
This is my first blog post. Gosh. Just… wow. It’s a thrill to be here.
Oh, also, there’s this little thing called 30 Covers, 30 Days that’s on its way back for NaNoWrimo 2011. But that’s really the sidebar to the feature story that is: Tim Kim’s First Blog Post. If you listen, you can already hear the odes being composed about this day.
Look, you already know all about this 30 Covers, 30 Days thing. You know that the cool kids call it 30C30D. You know that John Gall, VP and Art Director for Vintage/Anchor Books, has been heading up a crack team of designers who whip up a book cover a day during the month of November—pulling off feats of design that are Cirque du Soleil-worthy. You know that the event’s all of three years old, but has already spawned some incredible art for your incredible stories (precocious enough to be the scene-stealer on an ABC sitcom, yo).
What don’t you know? What an Office Captain blog post is going to look like with Tupelo gone. (Spoiler alert: less well-written for one.)
(Double spoiler alert: experiments with fairly cheesy catchphrases, like “spoiler alert,” for another.)
This 30 Covers, 30 Days thing is pretty nuts. Mr. Gall’s got some experience with being a maestro, the capo to a crew of heavy-hitters. In 2009, he oversaw a team that redesigned all of Vladimir Nabokov’s book covers; their final product is ridiculously beautiful. This is the guy who’s going to supervise as 30 Wrimos’ synopses are turned into book covers like this one. Or this one.
Now, there’s been a lot of speculation about how we choose the novels that receive a cover. Wombats? Time-traveling ghosts? Predestination? Sure, those were my first thoughts, too. But I suspect the answer’s in the technology: our ever-brilliant duo of Dan and Jezra have reprogrammed a couple of Roombas we have on hand, and they’re now clicking away constantly at their MacBook Airs as they trawl through synopses and titles to pick out the lucky 30.
The Roombas are real cute. We call them Botman and Robin the Bot Wonder. (Though we’re open to renaming them. Suggestions?) They’ll be keeping an eye out from mid-October through November. Get those synopses ready!
In the meantime, check out the 30 Covers, 30 Days forum. Throw in a worthy novel in our nomination thread! Talk up your favorite covers from last year, or your favorite book cover ever!
I’ll be working on my second blog post. It’s pretty clear that’s where the stunning personal revelations are going to lie. The pearls of wisdom that will change the very chemistry of brains. Get ready!
Keep on keeping on (What do you think of this sign-off? No? “Keep on trucking”? Hmm…),
– Tim
Photo by Flickr user Klara Kim
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