Decisions in New Zealand

I see that the Ockham Book Awards in New Zealand have dropped two titles from contention because AI was used in the cover illustration. This caught my eye because we’ve just reissued all the Dirty Shirt books with new covers and our search for an artist was the first time I’d come face to face with the bottomless sink that is AI illustration. I won’t go into any of that here though. We got the covers we wanted in the end, having specified time and again that artificial intelligence could keep its grubby little hands to itself.

   But for the first editions we didn’t use illustration at all. Way back in 2023 it was a case of finding an appropriate picture that could be wrapped around the cover and getting permission from whomever owned it.

   In the case of The World In A Sandbag the owner happened to be (coincidentally) Archives New Zealand, so my publisher Tom had to send a nice email off to The Department of Internal Affairs in Wellington. Maybe it was because Jacinda Ardern was unexpectedly stepping down, and a particularly bad cyclone had struck North Island, but the New Zealand government wasn’t being very helpful to small English publishing houses just then. So Tom asked me. Being affiliated with a university, I had a swankier email address than he had.

   I discovered that ‘Department of Internal Affairs’ is ‘Te Tari Taiwhenua’ in Maori, because the NZ government uses a lot of Maori in its official communications. I approved, and joined in the spirit of things by answering their Ngā mihi with my own Go raibh míle maith agat. I don’t actually speak Irish, but it was the thought that counted. The ancestors were being honoured.

   Anyway, the negotiations went roughly like this:

Me — ‘Hi, I was wondering if we could slap one of your pictures on a book cover.’

Archives New Zealand — ‘Yeah, no worries, John.’

Me — ‘Cheers.’

Archives New Zealand — ‘Ngā mihi.’

So this was the picture:

'Zonnebeke' (c.1918) by George Edmund Butler, reproduced by kind permission of Archives New Zealand.

That’s watercolour, that is. George Edmund Butler wouldn’t have dreamed of getting AI to do his pictures for him.