This ... this is why publishers shouldn't use stock photography for their covers

Man...that is total balls, dude. But on the bright side, now I have a new entertaining blog to follow!

Good Lord.

bah

Yeah, if one publisher thinks an image would make a great cover, chances are others will think so, too. I think the only way to ensure originality with stock images would be to choose something horrible.

What blows me away is how PROUD of it they are. I just finished Cherie Priest's 'Hellbent' and its cover was badly cobbled together from three or four separate images. All of which are cited on the back cover.

Really, a competent painter is that expensive?

Wow, that's impressive. Several of those covers are fairly decent on their own, but line them up next to each other, and... yeah.

This isn't about using stock images. This is about being cheap about using stock images. Stock images are licensed. You can either buy a license for your use, or, for more money, a license for exclusive use in an industry, region, time period, or other restriction. A two-year exclusive for use as a novel cover in North America would be a reasonable license to negotiate. But it will cost you more than a simple license to use the image.

As a photographer and designer myself, I can avoid this issue on any books I self publish. But I'd be willing to sell fifty or so of you the same image to use on your books.

Oh wow.
I've seen this sort of thing with 2-3 covers before.
But not that many...

Is that real or is it just some snazzy photoshopping?

Like Gotchan said, this isn't about stock images, this is about being cheap. Why commission artist/photographer for something original when you can pay $10 or less, or even grab free stuff, to use for your cover.

Maybe this is why people keeps saying 'don't judge the book by its cover' so publishers can get away with this.

(I kid, of course.)

Oh, dear.

Hee, hee. That is hilarious. I mean, it is a very nice photo, and certainly evocative. But, man. I especially like the ones that pull the woman out and stick her somewhere entirely new, like a city street or a warzone. With her birdcage!

Special award to the one who made everything blurry. Because blur is art.

Many of these stock collage covers really have little to do with the actual story inside them. They're great for evoking a vague feel or telegraphing a genre, and cheapskate publishers will try to get the most out of their stock photos.

So, we have embarrassing cover fails like these.

But as Alessandra pointed out, decent painters aren't as expensive as people think. We might not all be Mike Whelan or Kinuko Craft, but DeviantArt has some spiffy designers working for very reasonable prices.
Who might actually READ the damned story and come up with something to showcase it.

And frankly, as a writer, I think covers are super-important. I've not bothered to query three publishers, including one run by a friend, because their covers are truly horrible random collages of stock and out-of-copyright images.

Never judge a book by its...

Forget it. I can't.

I want to see all these books next to each other on the bookstore shelf...

There's a site - which I don't have the link to right now - that collates the cover art reuse on Mills & Boon/Harlequin historical romances, classed into number of times reused, and special mentions for resuse of cover art on a different book by the same author. They flip them and crop then and recolour them (changing the colour of the heroine's dress is popular.) But they're still spotted. I've seen the same cover on two Mills and Boon Blaze books by the same author, but the guy was so hot I wouldn't have complained if I was her.

Seeing this, makes me wish publishers would let writers who are also artists design their own covers. Because I certainly wouldn't want my book looking cheesy(not implying said covers in blog look cheesy), or looking like some other book's cover. If I were to ever have my book published, I would want to be the designer of my own book cover. But that's unlikely to happen, and I need to finish the darn thing first.

Filigree said:

Really, a competent painter is that expensive?

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Alessandra Kelley said:

No, we're not. We're really not.

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Over the years I have pointed out (about a gajillion times) that the best covers ever are the original James Bond books and everything that Denis McLoughlin touched. The man was physically incapable of turning out a bad cover. Modern books would do well to return to fully-painted original artwork.

There are books I have bough specifically for the cover (King Harold's Son by Richard Strong comes to mind, and only for the Perrott painted cover). YMMV on that being a strong enough reason to go buy a book.

Filigree said:

Really, a competent painter is that expensive?

Click to expand...

Alessandra Kelley said:

No, we're not. We're really not.

Click to expand...

And you're not that hard to find either.

Over the years I have pointed out (about a gajillion times) that the best covers ever are the original James Bond books and everything that Denis McLoughlin touched. The man was physically incapable of turning out a bad cover. Modern books would do well to return to fully-painted original artwork.

There are books I have bough specifically for the cover (King Harold's Son by Richard Strong comes to mind, and only for the Perrott painted cover). YMMV on that being a strong enough reason to go buy a book.

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I've got some 70 books in my bookshelf that are all from the same author. And all of them have original artwork - all 70 of them - all made by the same artist. Makes using stock photographs seem kinda lazy...

It's a well known problem. A facebook group I am on occasionally spots these and posts the offending covers side by side...

One thing that my publisher for Transitions does is offer the author the right to have a say in the cover design of thier book (which from what I have seen is quite rare...). There is a form to fill in where you can answer questions about the characters and the designer takes these into account when designing it. I plan to include links to some photos I have taken which are relevant and make it clear that they may use them. That way there is a chance that the photos will be unique

Libbie said:

Man...that is total balls, dude. But on the bright side, now I have a new entertaining blog to follow!

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Ditto.

I've had only eight covers (for the magazine I write for), that is, I got the cover credit and the art drawn was taken from something that happened in the story. Each was done by a remarkable artist who was commissioned for that work.

(I have enlargements of them framed in my house as I am a terrible show-off.)

So, if a small, print publication can afford to do that ...

If I self-pub anything, I'm hiring an artist. Maybe Alessandra Kelley, because Post-Modern Pre-Raphealitism is cool.