You can’t judge a book by its cover.
Which explains why I have this image here.
Yes, I know what you’re going to say: ‘Hey, when you sell that many books, you can tell me Twilight was bad’. I’m going to say (because I fully own to being an elitist bitch): ‘No. Twilight is a literary piece of shit with no depth and no artifice. And just because 50 million teenagers think it kicks ass doesn’t mean that it’s good; it just explains why so many of them will eat at McDonald’s.’
Crap book, brilliant cover.
Trawling through the erotic fiction and erotic romance book section at Amazon, I began to notice how many absolutely revolting covers there are out there. I’m not on the ‘there should be hunky men on the cover, not naked women’ bandwagon. Naked men, naked women, couples engaged in coitus… it’s all so fucking literal.
There are, of course, some notable exceptions (many, I’m sure I’m forgetting the brilliant book your friend wrote with the enchanting cover). Claudia D Christian has some pretty spectacular covers for her books, but this is explained by the fact that not only is she a writer of some of the best ‘miserable love stories’, but she’s also an exceptional graphic designer who makes her own book covers. But on the whole, we’re treating our readers like they’re stupid. We are putting a nice big picture of the content of the package on the box so the morons don’t get confused as to what might be in there.
But what’s even odder, is that we’re really NOT putting the content on the cover – we’re going one step beyond that and putting an idealized version of what we HOPE the reader interprets the book to be. We can’t even allow them to bring the characters alive in their heads, we have to SHOW them that they’re perfectly proportioned young women in the arms of suitably impassioned looking and heavily muscled men.
Erotica is about the intimate, the interior, the world of the senses. If readers didn’t put themselves in the place of our protagonists, it simply wouldn’t be effective writing at all, so why on earth do we try to prevent that by picturing impossibly pretty people on the covers. And, if you really simply want to get someone’s blood pumping, why not a close-up of a cockhead with a little precum oozing out?
No! you say. Erotica is not about cocks! Don’t be so literal. Well, I agree. It’s not about pretty people either, so why are they on the cover?
I could easily find 100 really bad book covers and post them here, but I’m not going to bother because you’ve seen them and you know what I’m talking about. And for those of you who roll your eyes at some of the covers of the anthologies, they’re art compared to the 3D poser covers that look suspiciously like inflatable dolls with marginal sex drives.
What are worst of all are the 10,000 covers with some woman being embraced from behind while sporting an enraptured expression on her face. Do authors really want their books to like just like every other book cover out there? Perhaps the sad reality is the formulaic cover does indeed reveal a formulaic plot and cookie cutter characters. The direst situation is that one might indeed safely judge a book by its cover.
Come on! We can do better, can’t we?
P.S. My favourite book cover
I agree the covers can definitely put you off. I actually refuse to read a romance/erotic novel that has Fabio or Fabio next generation or some stunningly beautiful heroine on the cover.
I’ve been tossing about ideas for my book covers. I’ve got two firm ideas in my head. Both I’m happy with as they relate to the book. One exceptionally so as it can be carried on through the series.
I’m with you; someone who reads has their own imagination and is able to picture the characters in their heads. It will never be the same as two other people reading the book, but that’s what is brilliant about it.
thank you for sharing RG
Well, yes… but.
I’m all in favour of having some good, well-designed, appealing book covers. Back in the day when books were made of paper and cardboard (remember those? 😉 ) the book’s *cover* made a huge difference to sales. Really, really huge. Genre and Author came next, if I remember correctly.
But nowadays, with ebooks, I’m not so certain that’s as true. I certainly don’t click through Amazon’s ‘bookshelves’ in the way I wander down the shelves at a physical store.
We used to judge books by their cover. But do we still?
I agree completely. Leave it to the imagination. The biggest mikstake made in writing is spoon feeding the reader every detail.
Chuckle. Some folk LIKE the detail. That’s the glorious thing about people, endless variety. 🙂
I think a lot of erotica has followed the pattern of romance novels, which I’ve heard often referred to as ‘candy’. If one has a favorite candy, one identifies it by the wrapper. From the reader’s side you know you’ll get a sugar and flavor fix pretty much exactly the same as the kind you got last time – even if the details are a little different. From the writer’s side, you know that you’ll get all the candy-eaters picking up your book – and there are a lot of them.
That _may_ be a reason, and it’s probably _good_ for sales/circulation from a mass-market point of view. On the other hand, it isn’t very individualistic and it almost announces that the book isn’t relying on the uniqueness of the content or that particular author’s voice to sell the story.
But then, I’m speaking as one actively turned off by covers like you describe. On the other hand, put an image of a sexy spaceship streaking urgently through the black, preferably firing some obscene weapon, and you’ve got me – I’ll at least look to see what’s between the covers purely from the image speaking to my taste. We all like our candy.
I would think this is something that could be empirically tested, particularly in the ebook era. Put the same book out w/ 2 covers. See what sells. It might be important for them to all look alike (so readers know ‘oh yeah, getting a book in this genre’). It might not.
That said, there are clearly some covers that are lousy (I think Eisler bitched about one of his) as they convey nothing about the book. It should be connected in some way…
Big Ed
I agree with Ebony. I would like to quote : I’m with you; someone who reads has their own imagination and is able to picture the characters in their heads. It will never be the same as two other people reading the book, but that’s what is brilliant about it.
I think cover should not be covered with beautiful girls or handsome boys. I would like to go with the writer here then why not a tip of penis oozing precum.
Thanks for raising a serious issure here.
I thought this comment was interesting: “The direst situation is that one might indeed safely judge a book by its cover.” Now, I don’t think it could ever come to that–but if it were somehow possible, I don’t think that would be dire at all! I would in fact call it desirable.
In a perfect world, I’d like the cover of my book (or a book I’m choosing) to be like the perfect title, the cherry on top. A visual summation. Of course, a book is not a painting, and there isn’t always going to BE a possible one-image visual summation, any more than you can always describe a painting in words. They’re different art forms. But if you could get at the same emotions… I’d love that.
It’s very hard for authors to design book covers. For one thing, it’s an entirely separate skill. That’s why there are professional designers. It’s not an “anybody can do this” sort of thing. I’m not a designer, but I do work a bit in selecting art for the interiors of other books. Typically, a publisher will subscribe to a few image databases (which vary in price as well as quality), and that’s what you have at your disposal as far as images. I think I have a decent eye for selecting art for a few specific purposes, but then designing it up into a cover? I’m not that good.
I think most publishers don’t give authors too much say in what their covers look like. My erotica publisher said I could suggest images, and told me which database I could look through. I tried, and I couldn’t find anything I liked, not even anything close. They then told me I could submit my own picture (meaning I could purchase the rights, or somehow come up with one on my own). Gosh darn it, I kept thinking, why can’t I find a stockinged leg stepping out of a taxi or a vintage car? But I couldn’t… So I went with a leg at the airport, and my own leg in my local airport, because that’s what I could control. 😉 I don’t think a larger publisher would have let me send in my own photo, but I’m pleased my little indie one did. I did worry a bit about it not being a “typical” look, but … well, in a sense my target audience is someone like me. So it’s not that weird that someone like me is on the cover.
As for judging other books by their cover… an appealing cover absolutely does draw me in, if I’m browsing through a bookstore (and yes, even looking at representations of covers on Amazon). But funnily, I don’t hold it against the book if it has a crap cover. I’ve read some great books with crap covers, or even with the covers torn off.
Steve, Monocle, Shar ….
May you get exactly what you expect.
(I do believe that is the proper phrasing for the most hideous of literary curses)
Oh, God, I agree so hard. Most erotica covers make me want to stick shrimp forks in my eyes.
I don’t buy a book for its cover. As long time reader of Science Fiction I found out long ago the cover has nothing to do with the contents of the book. So when the cover has nothing to do with the book not surprised.
I _expect_ the inside of a book not to match the outside. It can’t, unless the author herself creates the cover intentionally as a faithful representation of something in the story – and has the artistic talent to pull it off. A well designed, stylized, nonrepresentational, and/or metaphoric cover makes that mismatch obvious. And good graphical design can make such covers just as eye-catching, if not moreso, than buff nekkid luvrs.
So, I would be more than happy for all erotica – and other genres – to have unique, stylistically cool, metaphorically insinuating covers.
Or sexy spaceships.
Oh, absolutely. I flipping hate a lot of the cover art out there. I’ve never been very bothered by the idealised people on the cover of romance novels. And whilst it may be true that perhaps cover isn’t so important for an eBook, I still take it into account when I look to buy one because it’s a measure of effort – the more effort has gone into capturing an idea and creating a brilliant cover, the more likely it is that similar effort has into the content of the book itself.
That’s the sort of book cover (Seven Types of Ambiguity) that I last saw at a village fête on an out-of-print book selling for 20p. It’s not inspiring me to pick it up… and therefore it fails in it’s purpose.
That’s because you’ve been so acclimatized to literal imagery. Actually, if you knew what the book was about, it is an incredibly apt cover.
Possibly true: but if it doesn’t inspire me to pick it up how would I ever know? Sorry, but to me it looks 60 years out of date, insipid and uninspiring.
As I said above, the wonderful thing about we humans is our endless variety. I don’t think much of that cover, but you obviously do – vive la difference!
A book’s cover, assuming it is visible in a store (digital or brick and morter), should attract a reader to pick up the book and read the dustcover, at least (the blurb in an ebook store.)
I’m a huge reader of fantasy and science fiction, and I’ll admit romance and erotica are next on the genre list. I’ve usually chosen the title and author before I hunt for a book, but I also browse while hunting, and sometimes kill time in a local Books-a-Million. Covers have never killed or forced a sale for me.
That said, there’s Eric Flint and his “Ring of Fire” series from Baen Books. He had a game going with late publisher Jim Baen of Baen Books. Jim would get the cover to him before final edits, and Eric would write a story to match (a short story in the anthologies, a scene in the novels). Novelist Lois McMaster Bujold has an essay about how poorly her covers hit the mark of anything in her books from the same publisher.
But I have no idea what the book is about, and shouldn’t a cover attempt to give some representation of what’s inside?
I loved reading books and then turning back to the cover at various times to realize what my favourite characters were doing at that point in the story, however now that I think about it, the fact that that cover is so ambiguous is probably one of the reasons it’s so apt 🙂
In turning the book over and looking at the cover half-way through, you have essentially let someone else determine your mental images of the characters? Er… well, I read to use my own imagination.
I am in complete agreement with you RG. And I did buy Twilight to find out what it was all about and do remember thinking the cover was brilliant. Shame the book was so…… unreadable.
Whilst I will buy good books regardless of the cover, I will NOT buy books with the cover of the movie version. It’s my pet hate. And I’ve never met anyone who likes that. Does it really help sell more copies? Or what? And why is it always books where the movie version was SHITE??
And as for erotic/romance covers? I consider that section of every bookstore to be a comedy section. It just makes me laugh. And cannot – no matter how hard I try – bring myself to buy a book with a cover that features shiny men and mid-orgasmic-looking women. I just… can’t. But then I am a snob when it comes to quality. It just matters to me.
If a book cover has a purpose, beyond decoration, then it is surely to encourage people to read the book. Once one has accepted that premise, the nature of the cover to be used for a book is likely to be influenced by whether one’s priority is to maximize the number of people reading the book or to attempt to persuade certain categories of person to read the book. Dependent upon whether one wants to sell lots of books, educate, communicate with the type of like-minded reader that one might prefer, or something else, a book cover could be something that serves that purpose but not necessarily be to one’s own taste. Some readers judge books by their covers but authors probably need to judge book covers by their desired readership.
Hmmm I’ve grabbed books because of many things but I do admit the covers influence me. It has to have an amazing back blurb for me to get past an awful cover because I do tend to think if a publisher or artist lets their work go out with a shit cover then the content can’t be too great. *shrugz* It would kind of be like wrapping steak in a picture of road killed raccoons… Not very appetizing LOL
N-E-Ways it was interesting to read your take on the barbie/ken covers & everyone’s responses
Came across this entry from the blog of an author I like–two different covers, and two different titles, for the same book (hers), one published in the US and one in the UK. A study in contrasts there.
http://www.moragjoss.com/pages/blog_01/index.asp
May I ask a question, please?
I’m not trying to be impolite.
Are you a man or a woman?
I don’t like violence or forcing or any of that — and its very clear to me that you know about the physical aspects of life. I wonder, what of the emotions, what of the idea of freedom and goodness?, what about that?
Answers to your questions:
1. Are you a man or a woman?
I am a woman.
2. I don’t like violence or forcing or any of that…
The vast majority of erotica available in print and on the web is happy, consensual erotica. So there is lots to make you happy out there.There are lots of great authors for you to read. Just not me.
3. ….what of the emotions, what of the idea of freedom and goodness?
Sometimes we can consider things more deeply and clearly in their absence.
It’s pretty obvious from your comment that you don’t enjoy reading my work. That’s absolutely fine. That’s what is good about freedom and choice, and the maturity to choose what you consume.