I have mentioned on several occasions my dislike of bad cover art. Well, I'm not the only reader who feels insulted when publishers put something tasteless, confusing or just plain butt ugly on a book cover. Click on the link (the post title) to see the results from the annual All About Romance worst cover contest. Unfortunately I somewhow managed to miss the 2005 voting, but never mind - I plan on voting in the 2006 contest.
-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
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Point being that I'm sure SOMEONE is going to complain no matter what you do.
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I agree and I think your magazine cover is a good example. If you click on the link and look at the contestants for best cover, there are a couple there that I would have rejected because of being too cheesy or too generic. The thing is that with book cover design, and especially romances, thrillers and science fiction, there is just so much sloppy design that could have been avoided by spending a little more time and money on it. Covers are a big selling point with many readers and I for one definitely think twice when I see a cover like the one that won the worst covers contest, because a bad cover design can easily mean that the editing and proofing are bad and the publisher simply isn't expecting that much from the book.