Skip to main content

Bad book covers revisited

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.
Labels:

Comments

Sandra Scoppettone said…
I've written about this in my blog. The covers are awful now because no one draws anymore. At least that's true in the U.S. I believe what they use is clip art. My last two covers were done this way. But I was lucky because they worked. Still, I miss the days of original covers.
November 29, 2006 4:38 pm
Jeff said…
The trouble is, like the book itself, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I remember a certain magazine, famous in one sector of the computing fraternity, which recently ran an issue with a picture of a bellydancer on the cover. Now, being a bellydancer, the lady in question was showing her midriff. I and thousands of others didn't mind one bit, but the magazine nevertheless got vehement complaints from readers and passers-by who saw the cover, and certainly DID object. Point being that I'm sure SOMEONE is going to complain no matter what you do.
December 01, 2006 12:36 pm
Bibliophile said…
Quote:
Point being that I'm sure SOMEONE is going to complain no matter what you do.
Unquote.

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.
December 01, 2006 12:50 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more