Coverflip

I always feel really sad when I read about a type of misogyny I hadn't realized before.

That said, I do tend to avoid books with photographs of teenage girls on them, mostly because I've come to associate them with the kind of stories I don't like: paranormal romances, dystopias, boarding school stories, etc. Having a girl on the cover doesn't necessarily make it a "girly" book, it's just that nine times out of ten, it'll be one of those that isn't my genre.

(For the record, the genre I prefer to read in is detective novels. So gender-ed covers aside, our best author is definitely a woman.)

I like looking at covers, but I totally ignore them in choosing a book. Which means I have quite a few books with ugly covers and/or misleading covers.

That some readers do worry about how they'll look holding a certain book, I've seen many times. During the HP craze, kids (and me) went happily around with jacketed copies of the latest Potter, while I caught many adults with the jackets off. In England, I understand, they actually printed "adult-covered" versions of the books.

Marian Keyes is an author who has been plagued with extremely girly-girly covers for books that are hardly candy-colored inside. Seriously, these babies must have acted like Kryptonite on men. I'm not sure I ever saw one in male hands. Or a Sophie Kinsella, of course. The pastel, it buuuuuurrrrrrns....

The abstract trend is also interesting. There was Twilight, with its brilliant black/red/white covers that eschewed swoony girls and dreamy vampires (and pastels!) for stark imagery unlikely to embarrass older readers. Not surprising that 50 Shades should have mimicked this style, and that its imitators should also be mimicking it. Most amusing quick switch in this trend was the morphing of Day's Bared to You from its original nekkid-lady cover to one featuring cufflinks on a graytone background. Anyhow, ladies can now read hot books without a blush. Although the observant observer will have realized that books featuring artsy-photographed mundane objects are the divell's-own mark of mainstreamed erotica.

At least they're not girly-girly.

Alessandra Kelley said:

Aw, Huffpo links always make my ipad crash.

It was a fantasy thing, not a gender thing, but in the UK Terry Pratchett's brilliant satirical novels, which had had the full-on clichéd fantasy book covers, complete with eye-searing colors, buxom underclad babes, and ridiculous weaponry, came out in new editions with "adult-friendly" covers with classic black backgrounds and elegantly photographed symbolic objects.

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In part due to the untimely death of artist Josh Kirby. I'm really glad I have a full collection of paperbacks from those editions - the Kirby ones are so much more fun than the new ones.

Phaeal said:

During the HP craze, kids (and me) went happily around with jacketed copies of the latest Potter, while I caught many adults with the jackets off. In England, I understand, they actually printed "adult-covered" versions of the books.

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They did. They really did.

Phaeal said:

Seriously, these babies must have acted like Kryptonite on men. I'm not sure I ever saw one in male hands. Or a Sophie Kinsella, of course. The pastel, it buuuuuurrrrrrns....

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Therein lies the beauty of the e-book.

Publishers put a certain kind of cover on a book for one reason, and one reason only: They're trying to sell the maximum number of copies.

The covers themselves aren't meant to illustrate the novel. They're meant to tell the reader, "This is the kind of thing you like, if you like this kind of thing."

James D. Macdonald said:

Publishers put a certain kind of cover on a book for one reason, and one reason only: They're trying to sell the maximum number of copies.

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That's the idea, yes. But they are really not very good at this, aren't they? Seeing how even stuff like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sells better with a more neutral cover....

I've found that my interest in the cover is more whether it indicates a 'cheap' publishing effort - the more amateurish the cover art looks, the less inclined I am to pick up the book. Right or wrong, the effort put into the cover tells me the effort put into the content of the book. The actual subject of the cover isn't really that important to me - once I pick it up, glancing through it tells me if I want to buy.

sohalt said:

That's the idea, yes. But they are really not very good at this, aren't they? Seeing how even stuff like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sells better with a more neutral cover....

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Publishers are very, very good at this. Like all books, however, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sold well because they were books millions wanted to read.

Neutral covers often sell very, very well, but so do all sorts of other cover types. But when you look at any book that sells millions of copies, something else is going on besides cover art.

Cover art actually sells very few books, anyway, no matter how good or how bad it is. Cover art just gets readers to pick up a book, and different types of books accomplish this with different types of covers. The number one thing that sells books is having everyone you know talk about how good it is. Then comes the book itself. If you pick up the book, the cover art has done its job. Then comes title, jacket copy, and the deciding factor, which is page one.

But by and large, publishers are extremely good at picking cover art that sells books, while simultaneously picking cover art that writers hate.

While so many benevolent beings exist here on this board and attest to "not judging a book by its cover" there are too many out there who do just that.

And, this being a business and all . . . I (the writer) am inclined to want a badass, awesome cover.

sohalt said:

That's the idea, yes. But they are really not very good at this, aren't they? Seeing how even stuff like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sells better with a more neutral cover....

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No, they work on this constantly, and they're really, really good at it. They put the kind of covers that they thought would sell best on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray, and guess what! They sold well!

CrastersBabies said:

While so many benevolent beings exist here on this board and attest to "not judging a book by its cover" there are too many out there who do just that.

And, this being a business and all . . . I (the writer) am inclined to want a badass, awesome cover.

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I can be blamed for judging a book by its cover. I admit it. I can take the public flogging.

There are two things that draw my eye when I am perusing. Most books I see have the spine out, for those books I am attracted to a catchy title. Then there are the books that have the cover facing the isle. The first thing that will catch my eye in this instance is the imagery. In that moment it is make or break for me.

Personally, pastels don't bother me. Happy people do. Then again happy people are more likely to irritate me in real life as well. I prefer covers sans people, unless they look badass.

"Whatever were they thinking of? That drawing. Those colours. Ugh. On any book it would be ugly, vulgar, and illegible. On his book it would be these, and also disastrously wrong."

-- The scene where Mr. Earbrass sees the cover sketch, in The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey.

That was written sixty years ago, and it's still the truth about the writing life. Ms. Johnson has only now discovered that the sketch -- the colors -- for her books' jackets are disastrously wrong.

Why do bookstores arrange their shelves by genre? Because that makes it easier for readers to spend more money.

While I agree that publishers choose jackets they think will sell the most and to certain markets, they at the same time can utterly miscategorise books and often because of the author's gender. There is also a reason that publishers for books they consider "big" get gender neutral covers: ie. THE HUNGER GAMES. They know they will get both genders to read a book with such covers, as opposed to more "feminine" covers which men won't pick up.

And while maybe they'd sell a gritty book by a woman to a large audience by making it look like a beach read, they also lose out on the gritty market. Publishers aren't flawless, sexism is real and deeply engrained in our culture. Putting certain kinds of covers on books also categorises them in certain ways, and can make these book seem lesser and not as note worthy, or not worth the big literary mags reviewing them etc. And this tends to happen to books by women with stereotypically "feminine" covers.

Further sure genres in bookstores are helpful, but they can also make or break a book. Especially if you find yourself categorised in a category that isn't as popular. Many AA writers get so frustrated being put in the AA or "urban" (ugh) section, because they know that means that only people looking for their books will find them. And further many might avoid that section altogether for a variety of (usually ridiculous) reasons. They can often be shelved there even if the main character just happens to be black, and the rest of the book has more to do with being a thriller or whatever. The same goes for women. Had Franzen been a woman he maybe would have been shelved in the Women's Fiction section, thus closing himself off from basically most male readers. Women who write the same kind of stuff he writes often don't get placed in General Fiction. No, they are far away in the land just for women. The non-universal gender.

This kind of stuff is far more complicated than "Bookstores and Publishers know best". Humans are the people who make up bookstores and publishers, and humans are fallible and susceptible to old deeply engrained attitudes.

Or are you saying the whitewashing of the cover for LIAR was totally cool because the publisher knows best and they shouldn't have changed it?


Anyway. Re: the topic at hand, specifically giving women more "feminine" covers that maybe their books shouldn't have . . . Here's an article I tend to link to in conversations like this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...ublishers-ghettoise-women-writers-and-readers

Lionel Shriver makes a good point. Given women are going to buy these books anyway, for the most part, why do they need to be branded girly when it's known that will put men off? In order to put men off?

Men need to be saved from teh gurly, so it doesn't make them impotent. Or gay. Or both.

(Do I need a sarcasm alert here? Oh, what the hell: )

James D. Macdonald said:

No, they work on this constantly, and they're really, really good at it. They put the kind of covers that they thought would sell best on Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray, and guess what! They sold well!

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And maybe those books with the pink sparkly overstuffed covers would sell just as well (or at least better than they do now) if they had equally neutral ones!

Why would any marketing department be infallible?

sohalt said:

Why would any marketing department be infallible?

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Did anyone say they're infallible? Just that they're very, very good at what they do - which seems obvious, since they do it professionally. But hell, just like the content, not every cover will be appealing to every reader.

shadowwalker said:

Did anyone say they're infallible? Just that they're very, very good at what they do - which seems obvious, since they do it professionally.

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Obvious, really? So everone who does anything professionally is automatically good at their job?

Really, the amount of faith some peope here seem to have in the suits in the marketing department is almost touching.

I've only taken some introductory courses in college, but my impression is that market research is less of an exact science as they would like you to believe....

sohalt said:

Obvious, really? So everone who does anything professionally is automatically good at their job?

Really, the amount of faith some peope here seem to have in the suits in the marketing department is almost touching.

I've only taken some introductory courses in college, but my impression is that market research is less of an exact science as they would like you to believe....

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So if professional book cover designers hired by publishers aren't good at what they do, why do so very many copies of books actually, yanno, sell?

Your logic seems fairly flawed here. You've taken books that were mega-sellers, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, and are making some point that I can't follow about their original covers being bad. You don't seem to have accounted for the fact that they became mega-sellers with their original covers. And in the case of Twilight, the original covers spawned a plethora of similar covers, which increased the sales of those books.

Yes, some book covers are really bad. That's true of pretty much any product of any type. But on the whole, book publishers do a good job of producing effective covers, as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of books sold.

People are talking like there's one true design choice for a book cover, and if any other cover is used, that book will fail. If that was the case, publishers would never make new covers for books that'd sold well. So to say the cover used on a successful book was how it had to be, and we just have to live with the prejudices shown in the design choices, doesn't hold water as an argument. The book could have been given a different cover that would also sell lots of books and didn't show those prejudices.

Polenth said:

People are talking like there's one true design choice for a book cover, and if any other cover is used, that book will fail.

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Really? Where? That sounds like a straw-man argument to me.

For myself, all I'm arguing against is the following statement by a single poster:

sohalt said:

But they are really not very good at this, aren't they? Seeing how even stuff like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey sells better with a more neutral cover....

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This is demonstrably untrue. Both books mentioned sold extremely well with their original covers; it was with their original covers that they became mega-sellers. Therefore, it is difficult to argue that their original covers were detrimental to their sales.