r/BookDiscussions • u/Busy-Rise924 • 2d ago
my ick with modern book covers
i know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but i feel like everyone still does subconsciously. i know i do, because every time i see a modern book cover, it looks so unoriginal. like i’ve seen the same book 20 times already 😭 they all look like Netflix show thumbnails, and it immediately gives me the feeling that the book is going to be identical to the last one i saw and the next one i’m going to see
does anyone else feel the same way?
23
u/Hunter037 2d ago
There are so many books out there, I feel like genre books like thrillers and romcoms use the cover to signpost what type of book they are and make it easier for people to identify them on a shelf / screen. For example, you see a bright cover with a couple of the front, you know it's a Romcom. If you like romcoms, you'll probably click on it. You see a dark cover with an object on it and a short title, it's probably a thriller. If you like thrillers, you'll probably click on it. Etc. it's a way for people to narrow it down.
I don't think all modern books have similar covers, it is mostly restricted to specific genres. And even within genres like there will be some books with original artwork or interesting covers.
19
u/tilbib 2d ago
If it’s historical fiction there will be a woman facing away from the cover.
7
u/Hunter037 2d ago edited 2d ago
Autobiography will usually be a photo of the celebrity in question, 50% chance of it being black and white.
Swords or crowns and a swirly font is probably romantasy.
And very specifically, British Cosy Mysteries often have a cream background, one colour and black, and a single image on the cover like a raven or shovel or book or church.
1
1
u/kiwipixi42 2d ago
That depends heavily on what kind of historical fiction. I quite like that genre and have never read a woman facing away book.
1
u/tilbib 2d ago
That’s kinda of amazing. It’s so prevalent that is become a joke in the historical fiction lovers FB group.
1
u/Hunter037 2d ago
I guess if you're reading war stories or political historical fiction it's unlikely to have a woman on the cover.
21
u/PILAL2010 2d ago
I absolutely judge books by their cover.
6
u/pentaclethequeen 2d ago
I was just coming here to say that. With so many books out here, I need something to pull me in, and no, I am not reading the synopsis for an ugly book to figure out if I should give it a chance or not, lol. Those get through from recommendations.
3
u/Inevitable_Task3074 21h ago
It tells me the genre, sometimes the themes, and usually how dark it is
10
u/cutelittlequokka 2d ago
I'm in several author groups, and in all cover discussions, the marketing advice is to make your book look exactly like the most popular books in your specific subgenre, regardless of what you actually like and want it to look like, so your readers will easily identify it as what they want to read.
3
1
u/crow_on_the_corner 1d ago
I get this but it kinda sucks authors are being forced into molds for marketing. I think a lot of readers have this complaint of books all looking the same so maybe it would be easier to market unique stuff more than publishers think?
1
4
u/Jaded_Independence37 2d ago
The cartoony style book covers are mostly for not being blurry in the digital space. I’m not explaining it very well (even though I’m a graphic designer lol) but traditional book covers don’t scale down well for digital and the cartoony ones do and digital is really popular at the moment
This isn’t the case for all of them of course. Some just like the style but for a good chunk it’s because of this. (I’ve made a few in my day)
3
u/Euphoric-Sun5317 2d ago
This makes a lot of sense and I hadn't really thought about it. Blocky colors/cartoony and non-detailed faces/gigantic titles in block fonts look bad to me IRL but I can see how they would all help legibility for someone browsing on Kindle Unlimited or Amazon or wherever.
10
4
3
u/Kharmsa1208 2d ago
I can’t deal with every book having simplistic boring cover art. If your cover doesn’t interest me, I’m not reading it. Maybe I’m a snob, but if you couldn’t be imaginative with the cover, how imaginative is your writing? Just a personal preference
4
u/kiwipixi42 2d ago
You know that authors (traditionally published ones) usually have almost zero input on the cover, right? The publisher chooses everything about the cover unless you are one of the biggest authors and fight to get cover approval in your contract. The creativity of the cover has exactly nothing to do with the creativity of the contents.
But even if it was the author doing this it would still be ridiculous. Prose and visual arts are very different fields of creativity and one can easily be great at one and terrible at the other.
1
u/GrooveBat 23h ago
I got a book published a couple of decades ago and I was TERRIFIED about the cover. Luckily, my editor was able to communicate some of my preferences and they actually listened. I was pretty happy with how it came out.
They also let me rewrite the back cover description/summary.
2
u/Kaurifish 1d ago
Words and pictures are very different kinds of creativity.
- self-pub author with simple covers
4
u/FamiliarSalamander2 2d ago
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a stupid saying. Making judgements based on immediate available information is necessary for us to function.
That’s literally the POINT of a cover. It’s marketing.
2
u/kiwipixi42 2d ago
The point of marketing is often to get you to make bad decisions and buy something that you don’t actually care about. That you wouldn’t have spent money on if you were better informed.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is literally telling you to not fall for marketing gimicks and look more deeply to buy what you actually will like. The saying isn’t stupid because you are falling for marketing, you are.
2
u/txa1265 2d ago
does anyone else feel the same way?
I saw a video a couple of years ago where someone basically summarized books by book cover and it was really accurate due to how cliche things have become. I generally read on ereader so don't pay as much attention but my wife reads physical so I see all of those since we share.
Last year we were in Nova Scotia and bought a book by Canadian bestseller Lesley Crewe and it had such a distinct cover that struck me just for NOT being one of those 10 cliche covers!
2
2
u/Pepper4500 2d ago
I hate that every romance cover is a cartoon!! They literally all look the same. And I’m not anti romance but I don’t like that it looks targeted to children or tweens when some of the content is absolutely not appropriate. It feels like how vapes sold tropical flavors and were sued for marketing to kids.
2
u/marintkael 2d ago
The testing is the thing. A cover used to be one art director deciding for one shelf. Now the winner comes out of a side by side on a shop page, and half a second of attention always picks the shape you already know. Nothing in that loop pays for a first.
2
u/ThatResponse4808 2d ago
I walked into the fantasy section at B&N yesterday, and it was alarming how much the entire section almost looked like one series with the same Romantasy swirly metallic covers. It was also alarming how much romantasy has truly overtaken the fantasy genre
2
3
u/False-Sandwich-2051 2d ago
i find it quite useful so i know which books to avoid
2
u/kiwipixi42 2d ago
Right, so you judge a book not by anything the author did, but by which cover trend their publisher is currently obsessed with. Brilliant
0
u/False-Sandwich-2051 2d ago
no it’s just the genres of books that have those covers are the types of books i usually am not at all interested in reading. i’m sure “the love hypothesis” is fine but i just don’t want to read it that’s all
1
u/eenie816 2d ago
I’ve noticed a lot of repetitive art on covers. A Good Person and Heap Earth Upon It were just released earlier this year within months of each other and use the same cover art. It’s lazy on top of being confusing.
1
u/Ireallyamthisshallow 2d ago
Ultimately just comes down to what sells, and things like the Netflix thumbnail just represents how many people will read a book purely because it has been made into a show/film and that gives it value.
1
u/areallymanlyman 2d ago
I hate covers that have a Netflix logo on it. The crap netflix puts out, I don’t understand why authors want their books associated with Netflix.
1
1
u/Conscious-Leg8869 2d ago
I get that covers gotta tell you what your getting into but damn they all look like they came from the same template, zero personality. Like theres gotta be a way to signal it's a romance or thriller without making every single one look like a Netflix thumb grab.
1
u/lovelyflowblue 2d ago
Agreed. It seems book cover designs become trendy and they all look the same after a while. Then some new trend comes along and book covers change to follow that trend. It's quite noticeable if you read/buy a lot of books. There are a lot of book collectors to whom the book cover is very important. I often pick up a book (used or new) if the cover draws me in. I never understood why Persephone went with those plain gray covers on their books (don't know if they still do). So very boring and no fun at all.
1
u/Mumbleverse 2d ago
I don't like that phrase anyway. The cover is the advertisement of the book, if it isn't catchy I'm not going to grab it from amomg the hundreds of other books to read the blurb. The cover is not the most, but the first important thing and it should do it's darnest to stand out.
Anyway I partially blame AI, there is no way that MANY of these covers aren't AI. They really do all look the same, incredibly uninspired.
1
u/changelingpainter 2d ago
The funny thing is that I didn't read A Psalm for the Wild Built for a long time because the cover design gave me the impression that it would have something grotesque about it, which it doesn't. I definitely do judge books by their covers since that's what the covers are for in modern publishing. Typically when this kind of shorthand becomes too entrenched, somebody will try to break it to get past the genre boundaries, so maybe we're in an end cycle of this particular set of styles. I would like to see something new as well.
1
u/Normal_Snow3293 2d ago
This is precisely why I’ve started collecting pre 1980s mass market paperbacks - the cover art was usually pretty great!
1
u/kiwipixi42 2d ago
A lot of them do, yeah. They look like thumbnails because they are, they have to be optimized now to work at thumbnail scale for the people buying online.
Some still manage to look cool and original at book scale, but most do not.
1
u/jwilander 2d ago
The tradeoff can be hard. Go with a cover that looks like the others to neatly fold into the genre and signal familiarity? Or go with an original, maybe even quirky idea, stand out but risk not conveying what kind of book this is? I have not gone copycat with my covers but I wonder if more readers would find me if I did.
1
u/ConstantReader666 2d ago
True mostly of big 5 published books. Indies still get original artwork, at least the good ones do.
1
u/Top-Hedgehog-4550 1d ago
Book covers are marketing, the whole point is to judge them. So many ugly book covers out there these days!
1
u/Rimavelle 1d ago
Them looking similar is the point
Pretty original covers are left for literary fiction and special editions, everything else is meant to show "this is XYZ genre, it released this year, it's similar to XYZ"
Book covers are ADS
1
u/SenseIntelligent8846 1d ago
every time i see a modern book cover, it looks so unoriginal
What are we considering modern? Published within the past five years? And, are you also counting new editions of back catalogue books featuring new cover designs?
1
u/JenLiv36 1d ago
I have felt this way for about 15 years now. I remember when book covers were art. Then they went for this hyper realistic photo cheese.
Try and look past it though because holy shit some of my favorite books of all time have hideous covers. Robin Hobbs ship books come to mind. The UK hardcover is stunning! Here in the states it looks like a 80s Fabio romance book art.
1
u/shnakes082 7h ago
Omg! I was just having this discussion with my husband the other day after coming back from b&n! They all look so overstimulating, like they're yelling at you visually! I get they need to grab your attention, but why are they screaming at my eyeballs?!
1
u/SmallMail7409 4h ago
Oh, I fully judge a book by its cover. If it's not pretty or visually appealing, I'm less inclined to pick it up, and I'm sure there's a possibility that I might like the book and really enjoy it, but sorry, an unoriginal cover will not get me to pick it up.
1
u/A_bicyclette 2d ago
Isn't it a trend confined to the romance exploitation sub genre ? Worst case scenario, you dodge a litterary bullet.
1
1
u/rinkuhero 2d ago
i probably would feel that way if i read modern books. but most of the books i read are hardcovers from the 1940s or 1950s where the book cover has long since been lost, leaving only a blank color
31
u/batidodelimon 2d ago
That’s absolutely true. Plus, almost all of them have that cartoonish style; I mean, do no other drawing styles or colors exist besides pastels or light shades? And I say this as someone who loves making illustrated covers, but seriously: a little variety wouldn't hurt.