You know the kind. They often look like this (taken from another thread just now). That one is even more egregious by having the author’s entire body on the cover, not just the huge, creepy, too-much-make-up face which has become common. Dr. Phil published something similar. With the fist pump, even.
Most of these are garbage self-help books. Some are lousy business books. Occasionally you get a semi-decent autobiography.
So anyway, in addition to just ragging on how horrible these books usually are (in both style and substance), are there any examples that break the stereotype?
(Vaguely on-topic, vaguely humorous story: My dad got my little sister the Shel Silverstein book “The Giving Tree” for Christmas one year when she was maybe 4 or 5. But when she opened the gift wrap, the book was backwards, and she got to see a giant, glossy, hardcover photo of this guy first thing Christmas morning! She was actually scared.)
Yep. I don’t know much about Andre Agassi, but I figured autobiographies would be where the best of these types of books come from. Autobiographies or sports. Or sports autobiographies.
If the book is by a famous author and published (or reissued with a new cover) after the author’s death, there is a good chance there will be a photo on the cover, even if it’s not an autobiography. I have books like that by Richard Feynman (about physics) and Milton Friedman (about economics).
Thanks, I woke up the baby laughing at that. Never saw it before. Steve is kind of the antithesis of bodice-ripper material (no offense, I love him all the same). He did look dorky-cute in that attic photo in the mid 70s that was always on the back of his early novels. This, perhaps?
Cookbooks seem to have the author on the cover, usually in a kitchen setting, and they aren’t so bad. The big names in romance novels seem to forego the bodice ripper for a picture of the author- I think Jackie Collins graced her own covers for a span, for example.
More annoying to me are back cover photos on self-published books, which range from crappy shots outside the house to vacation pics with multiple people without saying which is the author to shots clearly intended for their profile on a dating site (Yes, Jessica Watkins, I’m looking at you).
My favorite is Jack Chalker’s Dance Band on the Titanic, which shows what is apparently Chalker himself at work on his computer, surrounded by his creations.
It’s the kind of cover I’ve seen numerous times with science fiction/fantasy authors…
[spoiler]…except, as a note inside the BACK cover informs you, that’s not Chalker – it’s the image of his often cover artist, Darrel K. Sweet. The note explains that the reason is that he, Chalker himself, looks like THIS unphotogenic shot:
“Now you know why”, explains Chalker. (The shot they used is even less appealing than this one, with Chalker scowling.)
What about the simple exploitation of an author’s hotness?? I don’t think Sebastian Junger’s face was on the cover of his books like The Perfect Storm, but he’s so leading-man handsome that his book tours were SRO.
I also remember a couple of years ago when a new woman author, Marisha Pessl was featured prominently in the PR with many photos that seemed more about her hotness than the modernist edge to her novels.
The common factor for almost all such books is that they’re books written (at least ostensibly, perhaps with the help of ghostwriters) by celebrities (who are famous for something other than writing books)—anyone from Amy Schumer to Carl Reiner to Emeril Lagasse to Barack Obama.
If putting a famous person’s face on the cover is going to grab people’s attention and sell more books, then by golly they’re gonna put the famous person’s face on the cover.
A great many seem to be “airplane books”… those smarmy business books written by gurus teaching other business types big secrets, sold in airports and designed to be read on the next flight leg.
Even though it was written by “Richard Bachman,” Rage has a likeness of Stephen King (as a teen) on the cover (sans glasses).
(I think it looks like him.)
A lot of books by Isaac Asimov have him on the cover. Seems to me Harlan Ellison put in a lot of Hitchcock cameos in the Pyramid/Ace days with the Leo and Diane Dillon illustrated covers (although the new ones all seem to look like this).
My favorite is this early cover of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness, portraying Rand as an aging streetwalker on Wall Street, complete with her signature black cape and dollar-sign brooch. Even the Randroids laughed at this photo.
Never saw it before. Steve is kind of the antithesis of bodice-ripper material (no offense, I love him all the same). He did look dorky-cute in that attic photo in the mid 70s that was always on the back of his early novels. 
