How Falling’s cover came together

If, like thousands (okay, hundreds… maybe dozens… probably about five, then… actually just me) you’ve marvelled over Falling’s moody, broody cover photograph, I thought in this post I’d tell you about the process of searching for and selecting it.

Firstly, it’s not the artwork I spent two grand on that appears inside the book.

Someone once asked why I’d go to so much trouble to art direct and produce it – it involved finding and commissioning both an aerial photographer (https://www.sydneyimages.com.au) and a digital artist (http://www.joebeckley.com) and took a lot of time and coordination as well as money – and not even place it front and centre on the cover.

There are a few reasons. First, I wanted it to be something you flip back to whenever you need, a reference as much as an advertisement. The sequences that take place on the Bridge have quite specific geography, and I wanted you to be able to see the size, shape and scope of the location more clearly than if I described it (plus I’ve talked before about how a picture of the New Sydney Harbour Bridge is worth a thousand words), like flicking back to the map of Middle Earth in the inside cover of Lord of the Rings.

The second reason is mechanical. The details in the image are small and there’s no real focal point to direct your eye. And that’s on a paperback copy that’s 15cm high – it’d be completely invisible on an Amazon or Apple Store thumbnail.

So I wanted something high contrast with lots of mood. The way the Sydney Harbour Bridge juxtaposes blue sky, clouds, the water or the bustle of the city or North Shore beyond in real life is tailor made for visual drama anyway, and feeble sunlight reaching ominously through the thick fog surrounding the grand arch capped it off beautifully.

It looks (to me, at least) like something huge and ghostly grasping for the city and the people in it, but even aside from being a visual metaphor for the plot, it’s just raised-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck spooky.

I’d started out specifically wanting to blend two elements – the bridge itself and some kind of smoke or fog partly obscuring it. The first likely candidates were news photographs from 2016 when dust storms in central NSW turned the skies over Sydney red.

There were heaps of shots of the bridge enshrouded in choking dust I could recolour to look like threatening and oppressive cloud like these;

Then I moved on to pictures of lightning storms besieging the city;

And there are some wonderful shots of the bridge and city enshrouded in fog and rain that worked too;

But sometime during the search I stumbled upon pure magic. The photo was taken from the Hickson Rd footpath on the harbour’s south foreshore on a foggy day also in 2016 by News Corp photographer John Grainger. The fence and other person in the pic gave it a bit of scalar context, but it was the hint of something huge and possibly dangerous coming towards the viewer, obscured by blinding light amid the gloom that gripped me. It encompasses the tone, theme and mood of Falling perfectly.

I hope it impresses you too.