Do you judge a book by its cover?
I’m not speaking metaphorically in this instance, but literally. 
Lionel Shriver wrote an article in the Guardian last week about how publishers use book covers as a way of targetting women readers…
“With merciful exceptions, my publishers constantly send prospective covers for my books that play to what “women readers” supposedly want. Take the American reissue of my fourth novel Game Control – a wicked, nasty novel about a plot to kill two billion people overnight. The main character is a man, the focal subject demography. Yet what cover do I first get sent? A winsome young lass in a floppy hat, gazing soulfully to the horizon in a windblown field – soft focus, in pastels. Dismayed, I emailed back: “Did your designers read any of this book?” When I proposed a cover photo by Peter Beard of sagging elephant carcasses – perfectly apt – the sales department was horrified. Women would be repelled by dead animals. We settled on live elephants, but it was pulling teeth to get girls off that paperback.”
The odd thing about this, of course, is that in general women read more than men, and oddly enough, that’s not just category romances and chick lit. They also read more crime novels and thrillers, and more so called “literary” novels.
It’s not just Lionel Shriver, of course. In my review of Happy Home for Broken Hearts for this blog, I quoted the Gaurdian review that commented that the book had altogether more depth than was implied by the pretty cover – and one of our commenters actually said that she would have been put off buying the book because of that cover design.
It’s not just about the gender agenda though. I can remember being quite bemused when I discovered that the Harry Potter books, and also the Philip Pullman had been published in separate editions – one set with covers that were intended for adult readers. In that case I was quite bemused by the idea, as I couldn’t quite understand why they would need to do that. But then, I am quite happy to read the best Young Adult fiction anyway, or even go back and revisit childhood by re-reading Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. It makes a pleasant change sometimes from reading about the darker side of life.
It really does seem like a mistake, to me, simply in marketing terms – to package a book that turns off a whole gender. And maybe it does, as Lionel Shriver suggests, contribute to the fact that novels written by women are less likely to be taken seriously, that they are given fewer column inches in the serious Books pages.
What do you think? How much impact do you think the cover of a book has on whether you would choose to buy it or not? My guess is that it affects me more than I realised.
Although I do smile when I remember buying a second hand copy of the Desmond Morris book, The Naked Ape, from a second hand book shop in Liverpool, way back in 1978. The shopkeeper looked at the cover, which showed the naked back view of a man, woman and child – quite modest by today’s standards, and snatched it back from me and said, “You’ll be wanting a brown paper bag for that one, Miss.”
About Ann GodridgeAnn Godridge has just completed her first crime novel, The Mermaid's Shroud, and has started work on the sequel. Her story the Tree of Knowledge was shortlisted for the Asham Award. She writes about writing and sometimes about textile arts at her blogStraw into Gold. You can find out more about her here - About Ann G.
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8 Responses to Do you judge a book by its cover?
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Yes, yes and yes again! I do judge a book by it’s cover. I recently read one by Matthew Reilly “5 great warriors”, the front page image is supposedly the main character Captain Jack West in a short sleeved T Shirt. He has a mechanical arm, you would never know it from the books front cover though. It displayed the image of a perfectly formed man. Clearly the illustrator couldn’t be bothered to read the book. It’s that lack of attention to detail that p*sses me off with publishers.
On the other hand, I loved the Harry Potter covers and never bothered getting the ‘adult’ cover editions.
I do think it’s important that the cover reflects something of the kind of book it is, but I absolutely agree that it’s much worse when the cover is factually wrong… Yuk!
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In fairness to designers called upon to produce book covers, there’s no way the meagre fees publishers pay would cover the time it would take for the designers to read the books in total. However they should at least be provided with a proper brief from the publisher on what the book is all about (and not the often-misleading “cover blurb,” either) so they can get a sensible grip on the content and context.
We authors have all been down that road of arguing with publishers over totally inappropriate and often ridiculous cover designs. I think the worst example in my case was with my very first book – “The Jewellery Book,” co-authored with gemmologist Norbert Streep and first published in 1981 (I was a child prodigy….:-)) In the book Norbert and I went on at length about how you should not clutter up too much classical, precious stones/precious metals jewellery together on one arm/hand or around neck/ears … and how you should never mix up white gold, platinum or silver with yellow gold unless you have a mixed metal piece …. etc. etc.
I was told that the art director would select a model and direct the photo shoot. When I asked if Norbert or I could attend we were politely told to keep our noses out. In those days full colour book covers didn’t come cheap in production terms – none of this digital stuff then. So after all the expenses of the studio shoot, 4-colour separations and processing, etc. had been incurred, we finally received full colour proofs.
The chosen oeuvre consisted of the side of a model’s head adorned with cheap costume earrings, with her hand clutching her cheek – each finger and the thumb were similarly adorned with crappy rings, and she had several random bracelets around her wrist. The overall effect certainly said “jewellery,” but it was “take one look at this and see how hideous it is” jewellery – wouldn’t have sold the book to anyone other than a rag-and-bone man.
Being so very young at the time (!!) I simply burst into tears when I saw it, but Norbert wasn’t such a pushover. He telephoned our editor and bellowed at him in Dutch for nearly five minutes before he calmed down enough to say we weren’t overly impressed with the cover design.
Whether the editor could understand the Dutch or not I’m not sure (I could understand some of it and trust me, it makes English swearing seem almost biblical by comparison.) But they rescheduled another shoot and asked us how best to portray the book’s content…
Twitter: SuzeStMWrites
Brilliant, Suze… I must get some of my Dutch friends to teach me how swear properly, that sounds very effective.
But how irritating – it matters enough on a novel, but to have a cover guaranteed to turn off the right audience for your jewellery book – insane!
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I wasn’t even aware for ages that there were different children’s and adults’ versions of the Harry Potter covers. I certainly would never have made a decision to buy the adult one – it strikes me that this is aimed at people pretentious enough to want to give off the message that they didn’t consider the books for children. We have the entire series in children’s covers, and I am more than happy for anyone to see me reading them.
I am at the moment in the middle of writing a novel, provisionally entitled (by my 9 year old) The Gift of Death. He also insists that he is to be the illustrator, and has so far drawn me the front cover. Actually, though the art is very stick-man, it is pretty cool. And unlike a graphic designer, he does actually know what the story is about, and therefore how it can be best represented.
I agree with Sarah (and Ann and Suze) that there is nothing worse than a misleading book cover. It is almost as bad as when they do a TV series “based on” the book but then change almost everything about it. As a classic example of this, LJ Smith’s Twilight series is utterly different from the TV version in plot. Not only that, but the lead female character in the book is a blonde – a feature which is much commented on – but on the TV she is a brunette. I do understand when plots get simplified for the screen, but why make such major changes all the way through?
I wasn’t even aware for ages that there were different children’s and adults’ versions of the Harry Potter covers. I certainly would never have made a decision to buy the adult one – it strikes me that this is aimed at people pretentious enough to want to give off the message that they didn’t consider the books for children. We have the entire series in children’s covers, and I am more than happy for anyone to see me reading them.
I am at the moment in the middle of writing a novel, provisionally entitled (by my 9 year old) The Gift of Death. He also insists that he is to be the illustrator, and has so far drawn me the front cover. Actually, though the art is very stick-man, it is pretty cool. And unlike a graphic designer, he does actually know what the story is about, and therefore how it can be best represented.
I agree with Sarah (and Ann and Suze) that there is nothing worse than a misleading book cover. It is almost as bad as when they do a TV series “based on” the book but then change almost everything about it. As a classic example of this, LJ Smith’s Twilight series is utterly different from the TV version in plot. Not only that, but the lead female character in the book is a blonde – a feature which is much commented on – but on the TV she is a brunette. I do understand when plots get simplified for the screen, but why make such major changes all the way through?