Organised by Dustin Breitenwischer, Frank Kelleter and Miltos Pechlivanos, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities".

Cover designers are among the first readers of a new work of fiction. Their task is to envision a manuscript as a bona-fide book. The stakes are high: a successful book cover becomes indelibly associated with the work itself, while a failure can mean embarrassment for the designer, the author, and the publisher. Based on hours of in-depth interviews, this talk examines the production of contemporary fiction from the perspective of the cover artist, one of the most important yet overlooked actors in the contemporary literary field, and it argues that book covers mediate a complicated interplay between art and commerce within a shifting media ecology.

 If you want to join in, please register with aiden.john@fu-berlin.de.