Here is an example. James Smythe’s book Way Down Dark and its striking cover (comes in three varieties with changes in colour scheme and type layout):
Nice. I like it. It has a strong Saul Bass feel to it.
Now here is a blog post at the PUBLISHER’s blog, posted by the EDITOR of the book and written by the AUTHOR about how great the cover is and what a brilliant job was done by ____ some phantom? A mysterious stranger? Did it appear by magic?
And the cover, of course, had to reflect the same things that the title did. So when I saw this image – of Chan, the novel’s main character, standing below the towers of the great spaceship Australia – it felt perfect almost immediately. And the font! It’s beautiful, somehow both art deco in style while having this slight futuristic edge to it. The whole thing is a pretty exceptional piece of work – and will work wonderfully for the rest of the series, moving forward.
That is great praise but who is being praised? I get that employees will have signed away formal moral rights to be credited and the IP rests with the publisher but heck – name somebody or name the team or the art-director.
Camestros Felapton 
5 responses to “Best cover thing etc: Why finding artwork credits is so frustrating!”
Sometimes the name of the artist is on the dust jacket, but not the electronic version of the book.
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Yes. I think many of the credits on ISFDB have been taken from physical covers – also more likely on a hardback with an actual dust jacket.
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Eric ran into that last year when he did the 2016 Professional Artists page for Rocket Stack Rank. We ended up making posts in places like File770 and Reddit begging people who owned the books to look on the back and see if there was an artist. We made a couple of visits to local book stores too.
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I’m feeling aggrieved now for the designers and artists who work on these. Unsung heroes! How hard would it be to put an extra credit in the front matter.
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With UK covers, the cover credit is always on the backcover and not in the front matter, so it gets lost in e-book versions. Though they could still add that little credit line to the electronic version.
Regarding self-publishers, a lot of self-publishers try to minimise the amount of front matter to maximise the preview at Amazon and other stores, so cover credits often end up at the back or are omitted altogether. Judging by his look insides, Nick Cole seems to subscribe to the “as little front matter as possible” philosophy.
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