Books and the Bees

Judging Books by Their Covers

Posted by Sadie , Sunday, July 18, 2010 8:10 PM

So, ever been told not to judge a book by its cover? Well don't listen, the covers are designed to draw you in, it is the first thing that you see when you pick up a book, and the last thing you see when you put it down. A Large part of the job in a book store is displaying books to show of their amazing covers, and in some respects hiding the awful ones, because the books with the covers that are amazing will always sell.
So by all means judge them by the covers, often for me a spectacular cover not only tells me where in the store I'll put it, but if the cover is awful I may not even bother to read the blurb, but for the really artful covers I will always read the blurbs.

In the images above, are some of my favourite books covers, and yes even Twilight is in there, all of these the publishers have put money time and effort into presenting a cover that is directed to the target market, that will pull people in to turn them over and read the blurb. In the case of Twilight that book is terrible, but the cover is amazing, and for the books like Fallen, personally I didn't like the story line overly much but I loved the cover and it is still one of my favourite covers, and for Hush Hush, I picked that up because of its cover, something which I didn't regret at all, it only took me 4 hours of reading it was so good that I couldn't put it down.

When it comes down to it, the books with the bad covers, the romancey novel covers, aren't being endorsed heavily by the publishers, there may still be gems in them, but the publisher has already chopped off its legs and limits its ability to sell to a visual culture. Case in point, the Billionaires Curse by Richard Newsome, it is a fantastic book which for a children's fiction title, it is one of the few I could compare in the pacing and the speed to a cross of Mathew Reilly and Enid Blyton. But the cover of the Billionaires Curse is not doing it any favours, to sell it to parents, even when I adore this book, it is a fight tooth and nail to look past what the cover is, to get them to listen to what I'm saying about the book or even read the blurb. It's wasn't just the parents either, even I was hesitant to read it and if the guy from the publishers hadn't sold it too me I wouldn't have ever picked it up.
The Billionaires Curse is the 2010 Winner of the NSW Premiers Literary Award

So the moral of my ramble, judge by the covers by all means, we are after all living in a visiual culture but remember that is the publisher backing its winning horse, the winning trend, but don't discount the ugly and less entrancing covers because there are some real gems there even if the publishers don't endorse them as readily as the Twilight Franchises.