Obviously we all judge a book by its cover. That’s why there’s a team of people who are responsible for coming up with the Manchester Underworld covers. It never stops being odd to me that there are actual models who appear on my books. People who I’ve never met but are the public faces of Keisha, Fauzia, Lesha and coming up for book 4 – ambitious young, journalist Ruth Porter.
Try as I might I couldn’t persuade my editor to have the cover photo be of Keisha in her iconic sunglasses. A human face and a bit of eye contact apparently works wonders for sales.
And if you look hard enough you’ll also see Malton lurking the shadows.
When it comes to time for a cover my editor asks me if there’s anyone I have in mind for the character to put on the front cover. The characters I enjoy writing most in the Manchester Underworld series are the women. Malton’s the man behind Malton Security but it’s the stories of the women who come into his orbit that always turn out to be the most interesting. Whether it’s sisters desperate to save their no-good brothers or bereaved mothers out for revenge, I find writing women to always be both more challenging and more satisfying than their male counterparts. As much fun as someone like Danny Mitchum is to write (and he is great, sweary fun) getting your teeth into what drives a woman to enter such a male dominated world and how she goes about holding her own in that world always produces great story ideas and wonderful moments.
So it was a no-brainer that it should be Lesha Thompson on the front of Wind Up Dead. But when I first got the proofs one thing didn’t quite work.
If you look at the cover in the blog post, aside from missing an author quote (we’ve got quite a few but they keep using the MJ Arlidge one. I’m sure he’s flattered) you’ll see Malton stood in what looks like a concrete underpass. If you’ve read Wind Up Dead you’ll know it’s set in and around Moss Side. A place I know inside out having lived there for just over a decade. Moss Side is red brick terraces, a handful of flats and factories and low rise estates. But no concrete underpasses.
So it didn’t quite work for me to show Malton stood in what could come across as a slightly generic ‘urban’ setting. Not a problem! Having explained things to my editor she went back to the design team and relayed that Moss Side is more gable end alley ways than underpasses.
One tweak later and now you had the cover that went out. Bricks not concrete. It’s a tiny detail but I try to make sure as much as possible that everything in the Manchester Underworld books has some kind of basis in reality. While the characters are all plucked out of my head, the Manchester they live in strives to be as real as possible.
Writing a book you find yourself in control of every single aspect of the world you create so it’s nice to be able to tweak the cover to make sure it’s pointing in the same direction.
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