My first novel The Running Man was published in 2004. My wonderful publisher at the time Dyan Blacklock assured me that the book would be around for 20 years. Ha! Sure.

But she was right. This year marks the novel’s 20th Anniversary and it is still in print, still selling and still being used in schools here and in Germany. Pretty amazing to me.

Anyway because it’s been 20 years since my first publication, over the next couple of blogs I thought I’d look back at some Running Man related things.

Starting with the COVER.

It wasn’t long after I got the exciting news that I was going to have my first book published that I began imagining what the cover might look like. One day I sat down with my son Joe and he roughly sketched some of the ideas we came up with together involving various running figures, mulberry trees and silkworms.

Below is one of my contributions. It’s man being attacked by a giant killer silkworm caterpillar. (I may have been losing focus at that point!)

I also had fun trying to design some covers using a set image and playing around with various fonts. I think I sent some of these to the publisher but they weren’t keen.

I actually really liked the background image. It came from the chair below that my daughter Meg had created for a school art project. We still have it in our garage. It could have been famous!

I had another attempt at creating a cover on my computer which I also thought was quite good but Meg reckoned the little white figure up the top looked like a half-man half-crocodile.

That’s when I decided I’d better leave cover-designing up to the experts!

The original cover design for the book was the one below. I really liked it as did Dyan my publisher. I thought it captured the moody, mysterious atmosphere of the novel. And I loved David Kennett’s depiction of the Running Man character.

However the pre-publication feedback from booksellers on that original cover was that they thought it was too dark and looked a bit like an adult murder mystery cover. They believed the cover needed to reflect some of the positive and uplifting things in the story.

So at the last minute before official publication the cover was changed to this (the stickers came later):

The new version was obviously brighter, with silkworm moths featuring along with words from Douglas Stewart’s beautiful poem The Silkworms which is central to the story. I was happy with it and glad David’s illustration still featured prominently.

So that remained the cover until the 10th Anniversary edition in 2014 which reverted back to the original concept with the addition of a lovely quote from Markus Zusak (The Book Thief).

And finally these are the overseas covers. (And isn’t it great to see the Dutch version using my original idea of giant killer caterpillars!)

So that’s my cover story on The Running Man.

Next time as I look back 20 years to the start of my writing career, I’ll blog about the process of deciding on an Author name.

Did I make the right choice? I’m really not sure.

Cheers
Michael