It turns out I judge books by their covers

Cafe Society
1

The local libraries offer ebook borrowing through Overdrive, a digital distribution company. Starting this week, book cover illustrations have not been showing up in search results. Just solid blue rectangles with the book title and author. If I actually click on a book, I can see the cover art.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but that’s not what this thread is about. What I’ve discovered is that I very much judge books by their covers. I’m not interested in the vast majority of the collection. And I realize now that I must have been applying a quick visual filter whenever I checked out their “new ebook additions” list.

Sure, I can tell that “The Earl Takes a Fancy” is probably a romance novel. I’ll skip that. But “The New One”? Once I click, I see it’s a book of funny parenting observations. Not today, thanks. But I could have figured that out from the cover.

And now I’m going to see if I tweaked a setting or something.

2

The key to an effective cover isn’t necessarily how pretty it is, but if it conforms to genre expectations. There are certain design trends that are consistent with, eg, murder mysteries, historical romance, YA sf, etc, that tell you if it fits your mood or what you’ve read before.

There are rubbishy bad covers on great books and amazing covers on awful books, but nobody judges the book’s quality on its cover, they only judge if it is the kind of thing you might like.

3

Everyone judges books by their covers. That’s the reason for cover art – to indicate the genre to the reader.

You can’t judge the quality, but a cover usually tells you the type of book it is.

4

I just never realized how much I relied on it until I couldn’t see a page full of covers anymore.

5

There’s a lot of complicated code packed into those covers by publishers that the writer has little say about, so much code that one could write a book. (Ha!) Definitely a picture is worth a thousand words…at least!

6

I always judge a book by its cover. I’ve probably passed over many good books because the cover didn’t catch my eye.

What I really hate about book covers in the last 20+ years is that the author’s name is in bigger print than the title of the book.

7

I’ll go you one further - I judge books by their spines! My preferred method of selecting reading material has long been to go into the stacks and simply read the spines. Some combination of title, font, and author contributes to whether I will pull a book out to peruse the flyleaf.

My daughter - a librarian - says I’m a freak! I disfavor the increasing trend to shelve books a la bookstores, with the front cover facing out.

8

This is in my to-be-read pile, almost solely because of the font they used for the title.

9

Back when Rowena still painted covers, I bought all the books with her art on it. As far as I remember I never regretted it.

10

I grew up judging books by their covers. Anything with that atomic symbol on the spine in the library was on my list.

11

It’s funny, I’ve never thought about it before, but I think I’ve never judged a book by its cover. If you asked me to name a book with a fantastic cover, I’d draw a blank. This differs totally from my other big interest besides books, namely records, for which I could come up with hundreds of great covers on the spot. I could also name a bunch of fantastic movie posters, but not one book cover.

12

They may not stand out, but if you’re in the mood for a history book, the typical cover of a bodice-ripper is going to tell your eyes to move along faster than the title will.

13

At one point I sorted my sf books by publisher and publishers number (most before ISBN) and trends in cover design became very apparent.
I have a DAW book called “Star” by C. I. Defontenay. It is a French space opera from 1854! Robert Silverberg mentioned it in his Asimov’s column, and I remembered I owned it. I hadn’t read it yet because the cover made it seem like a fantasy. So that cover worked against the book.

14

The Internet has placed major limitations on what a cover-designer can do: every cover must have a readable author or title or both when said cover is reduced to one-inch-high. (Approximately.)

Obviously before the Internet there was a lot more room for creativity because covers wouldn’t be reproduced in such a tiny size in the only place they might show up: print reviews. But thumbnail images became the rule once most book-selling and book-reviewing went online.

As for the author’s name in bigger print: that wouldn’t be true for new authors. But for established authors, the author’s name is the brand–and the brand is more important than the particular product in the brand line (in this case, an individual title).

15

Closest I can come to judging a book by it’s cover was back in the '60s when Frank Frazetta did the covers for the Lancer(?) Conan books. After that I looked at anything that had a Frazetta cover and, unfortunately, even bought a few that really sucked.

16

I decided to buy anything with a cover designed by Chip Kidd.

That was after I saw him give this hilarious TED talk live… (where he starts by dancing, because they made him wear a “skanky Lady Gaga wireless mike”…

What’s wrong with a nice stationary mike? It’s the sensible shoe of public address.

He even explained how he flashed on using a skeleton for Jurassic Park.

17

I read Gardner Fox’s Kyrick: Warlock Warrior because of the cover. The cover art had nothing to do with the story, but it was still an entertaining yarn.

I never had the nerve to buy Mickey Spillaine’s The Erection Set. I’m still a little curious about that one.

18

Oh, I’ve got a question: has anyone ever made a fake cover for a book (because the real one didn’t match the plot, or was embarrassing)?

[crickets enter, stage left] ::::sniff:::: I guess I’m allll alone…

See, I often walk around with a skinny paperback in my back pocket in case I have down time. The problem is, nowadays most paperbacks are thick, or even “trade paperbacks”. So I buy old compendiums of short stories from the 60s, at antique malls.

Well, the best assortments of classic short stories are the Alfred Hitchcock collections. Seriously! Saki, O. Henry, Graham Greene, Ray Bradbury, D.H. Lawrence, John D. MacDonald, even John Steinbeck.

But the covers are hokey, and almost always feature Hitchcock himself.
(I mean, who’s going to look at me and think “Ooh, he looks deep into that book, ergo he must be deep as well…” if my book has a roly-poly Alfie on the cover?)
Like these; not cool, reeeeally…

So I occasionally photoshop up my own “better” cover, often a collage of random images that match the feel of the book. I, of course, add a UPC and prices in USA, UK, Australia (and Lichtenstein), and make up a publisher’s name and logo. And sometimes put a short review on the back…

And then give it a new title as well.
I’ve stolen some from Seinfeld: “Prognosis: Negative”, “Blimp!”, “From Milan to Minsk”, but the best one was from Hitchhilker’s Guide:

“How I Scaled the North Face of the Megapurna with a Perfectly Healthy Finger but Everything Else Sprained, Broken or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks.”

(and, yes, I made all that fit on the spine, as well)

19

Speaking of Douglas Adams, the complaints about author names reminds me of The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul which mentions a Mr. Howard Bell, an author whose success was attributed entirely to his name and how great it looked on a book cover. The “Howard” part in smaller print at the top and “BELL” dominating the next 2/3s of the cover.