Publishers and their marketing departments devote a lot of strategy to cover art and design. Some of this seems like casting runes or reading tea leaves...my most recent book has an Asian-ish setting, but I was told my editor that Asian-style covers don't sell, so we couldn't have an Asian theme (other publishers, I note, seem to do fine with Asian-style covers). I was also told that fantasy by female authors sells better if there's a female figure on the cover, so by hook or by crook there had to be a woman on the front of my book. The end result is striking, but I have no way of knowing if the chick on the cover resulted in more sales than the solo male figure that was the original cover concept.
Readers' expectations are also important. Readers in certain genres expect certain styles of covers--a thriller reader expects big blocky lettering and little or no artwork, and a fantasy reader expects something that looks like a scene or setting from the book. If you deviate too far from these expectations you can hurt sales. My novel The Arm of the Stone was part of the launch list for Eos when it was a brand new imprint. One of the things that was supposed to define the imprint was a move away from conventional representational SF/fantasy artwork toward more graphics-inspired covers, and all the launch books had funky covers that didn't look a thing like the other SF/fantasy books out there. I liked my cover (to be honest, I hate most SF/fantasy covers). But readers really didn't. The publisher got letters. I got letters. I'm sure it cost me sales. For the sequel, the publisher went with more typical fantasyish artwork.
The covers of commercially published books have a certain look to them, in part because of custom-designed lettering. Someone who sees a lot of books can usually immediately identify something that's self- or POD-published, because of the use of standard fonts.
- Victoria
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