OH GOD WHEREFORE

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Oh, man, y’all, somebody in HarperTeen’s marketing department needs a raise.

Look what I shelved today:



That’s right. They Twilified Romeo and Juliet. And also Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and a bunch of others.

Do you think this works? Does slapping a big red thing on a pitch black cover and typing in fancy font actually trick teenage girls (and frustrated housewives) into reading any damn book they’d previously spurned? Maybe we should try Gothing up the covers of books like On the Origin of Species and see if it’s true! I really see no downside to tricking people into reading that.

At least there’s some color on these, though. The YA novels are looking increasingly gloomy lately. Every cover is washed-out greyscale. Although that is starting to serve as a warning: if you see a grey cover, you’re safe in betting you’ll find a bland normal girl torn between her One True Love, who is TORMENTED because he is a demon/vampire/fallen angel/demigod/time pirate as well as a jerk, and some other red herring rival dude, who is also a jerk. It’s just when this cover style starts bleeding into books I like that we have a problem. Can you just picture Beka Cooper looking all sad and greyscale, with bright red rose petals falling from her hand? Or god forbid Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegle?

Okay, yeah, neither can I. Nor can I picture that with my own OGYAFE. But if it does ever happen, I suppose SOMEBODY will read them.

They just won’t know what hit them.

Comments

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Actually, I rather support this brilliant idea - if they can trick people into reading good books, maybe they'll realize that reading can be awesome.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hah. I'm actually with you on that--hence my suggestion that this happen to Darwin's books! The biggest problem is that I see those covers and think, "Oh, god, Twilight ripoff" and pass over them. If they start putting these covers on good books, I may miss them!

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've got whole swathes of reading material I don't tend to touch because the concept has been done to death in badly written fiction these days...Twilight related stuff, most Urban Fantasy of any sort...essentially the majority of the YA stuff that the bookstore stocks and a good chunk of the Fantasy section to boot since the bookstore tends to stock what's currently selling rather than a broad selection that covers a wider range of possibilities. I *have* found myself pleasantly surprised by a few of the books I've read within those genres, but the overall quality of the writing tends to make it hard for me to convince myself it's worth the effort of sorting through the junk. I'd hate to imagine how much harder it would be to find the good stuff if suddenly the covers weren't decent indicators of what you're likely to find inside.

Also? If you do happen to want to try out some interesting Urban Fantasy, I recommend Ilona Andrews. She has a really distinctive voice and I love her characters.

[daiq.livejournal.com]

As a high school teacher, I don't think it works... Although slapping a positive quote from Stephanie Myers on The Hunger Games Trilogy DID work and the kids are all raving about those at the moment (and i very much enjoyed them too, like harry potter - great storytelling if somewhat weakly written, i love me my HP ;) )