A book by its cover.: seanan

A book by its cover.

I am essentially a magnet for books. It helps that I crawl through used bookstores like it was some sort of an Olympic sport, regularly raid the collections of my friends, get a lot of books mailed to me, haunt science fiction convention dealers rooms, and basically take every opportunity to get my hands on the written word. I try not to consider how many books I have, except on those occasions where I'm forced to try putting them back onto the shelves.

Some of my books are pre-cover ARCs. (There are two kinds of ARC. Some, like the ones for Rosemary and Rue, are essentially mock-ups for the finished book; they have front covers, they have back covers, and they look like books, except for the big "NOT FOR SALE" printed all over them. Others are basically bound manuscripts, with plain heavy-paper covers, and look more like the spec scripts that sometimes show up in specialty bookstores. I don't know if there's a technical term for these, so I just call them "pre-cover ARCs" and have done.) These are always interesting, because it means I'm reading them based on nothing but the back cover blurb.

How much does a cover matter? We're always told not to judge a book by its cover, but how much does the cover really matter?

It matters a lot.

The book I just read (which will not be named, because dude, you do not slag on other people's cover art; it's simply not okay) was in a genre I'm fairly fond of; I have an ARC not because I was asked to do a pre-review, but because the book is already out, and so the ARC got shoved off on me. No objections here, as I always buy books that I enjoyed in ARC—I consider it my part of the social contract. "I liked your book when I saw it in an advance form, so here is some money." Much like buying a book I enjoyed when I got it from the library. Anyway:

I had actually seen this book on store shelves, and totally failed to notice it in any meaningful way, because the cover was so non-appealing. I glanced at it, shook my head, and glanced over it. I didn't even realize I'd seen it—when I finished the ARC, I went to the bookstore, hunted down the book, and was gobsmacked to realize that it was "oh, that one." I would never have given the book the credit it deserved, judging solely from the cover. Which would have sucked.

(I realize that giving a positive, if vague, review, and then failing to name the book, is really annoying. I promise to review the book later, when it no longer auto-associates with my kvetching about its cover art.)

Covers matter. Covers matter a lot. More and more, I'm coming to realize that a good cover can make all the difference in the world between a book getting snatched off a store shelf that same book only getting read when somebody shoves it into your hands.

What covers do you especially love, or hate?

Deleted comment

seanan_mcguire

May 14 2009, 18:30:00 UTC 8 years ago

New comment

Don't be embarrassed! The Toby covers are an interesting example, because on the one hand, they are very much of a muchness with what's currently popular. Moody young woman, check. Vaguely inhuman, check. Noir-esque color scheme, check.

The big difference, in this case, is that Toby is a) brunette—gasp! What a boring hair color! People don't really have that hair color, do they?!—and b) about as sexy as a stick. She's an Ace, not a Rose, and that's very rare on current store shelves. So for people who have a stake in the current genre, she's sort of "wait, is that girl...wearing clothes?", which becomes a selling point.

It's weird but true.

xjenavivex

May 14 2009, 18:59:29 UTC 8 years ago

Dead on for me.

May 15 2009, 01:59:06 UTC 8 years ago

It's good, especially with a starting series, to "package to the genre," catch readers that way, and then go nuts. Once I have name recognition, well...

I'd like the cover to Discount Armageddon to involve Verity being her very, very Technocolor self, is all I'm saying.

keristor

May 14 2009, 19:27:27 UTC 8 years ago

Of course there were the Gollancz SF covers, every one of them bright yellow with SF in red and black writing. I loved them because it meant that I could find SF in the library! (Hale did mostly black, with SF on them but harder to spot.) For me the "they all look the same" was a big advantage, and I think I still find it that way. It's something like a recommendation, "if you like that, you'll probably like this".

Michael Whelan could do no wrong, in my opinion, I've loved every cover I've seen by him. I don't know whether he read each book before accepting the contract for the cover but I've liked most of the books with his art (again, the recommendation of the same sort of cover).

One of my favourites, though, because it is so absolutely wrong for the story, is the original of Diane Duane's "Door Into Fire". I have a copy, and sometime I'm going to ask her to sign it to see what colour she goes *g*...

However, apart from the recognition factor I don't pay much attention to covers unless they are really outsanding (good or bad). Anything not an extreme either way is likely to neither attract me nor put me off, for me it's neutral. I don't remember the last time I actually read a book because of its cover, or failed to read one for that reason, possibly because these days I tend to get books based on personal recommendation and either borrow them or order them without seeing them (the latter generally in the case of series or known authors).

May 15 2009, 01:59:18 UTC 8 years ago

That makes sense.

alethea_eastrid

November 10 2009, 00:09:49 UTC 7 years ago

I will occasionally pick up a book to look at based on the cover. It never makes the read/not read decision, though; it can just land the book in my hands so I can read the back blurb.

Of course, I can spend three hours in a bookstore reading the back blurbs of anything in F/SF that I'm not already familiar with, so catching my eye isn't that big a leg up for a book.

Log in

A book by its cover.

Error