Seriously, Why Feet?

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Here's an entertaining experiment: Maureen Johnson asked her Twitter followers to reimagine book covers after swapping the authors' genders. Some of them are painfully funny.

Of course, this just brings home to me that most book covers, aside from being gendered as FUCK, are also terrible. I remember getting fairly grumpy as I shelved books at the library: all the male authors got Jackson Pollock ink splats, and the female authors got random fruit, random flowers, or, for some reason, feet. And then of course there's the Angsty YA: dudes get monochromatic silhouettes, and the ladies get monochromatic greyscale soft-focus girls looking thoughtfully away, possibly at the wind machine that seems to be blowing their hair all over the place.

But then, y'all know my take on covers. I like covers that are splashy and pretty and brightly colored and goddamn LITERAL. Like these Alanna covers. Or any of these. That's the kind of book cover that makes me want to read the contents. I'm not so sure I'd want to read any of the books with whatever the hell is going on here.*

Probably this goes along with the simple principle that if you really CAN'T squeeze an exciting and dynamic scene out of your book to put on the cover, I probably don't want to read it. If your cover has someone chucking a spear at a dragon, or flying a spaceship over a mysterious planet, I get pretty interested pretty fast. If, on the other hand, your cover has, say, a pair of shoes and some doodles on it, I will assume your character's head is so far up her own ass that she never manages to accomplish anything interesting at all. The problem, as illustrated above, is when the books that DO have awesome scenes get stuck with shoes or mooning teenagers. Why the hell would you even PUT that on there when you could have somebody do a Drew Struzan-like splash of awesome?

Listen, publishers: unless your book is a picture book, I get exactly ONE illustration per volume. MAKE IT A GOOD ONE.


*I know I've used this comparison before, but I don't care because it's still a perfect one.

Comments

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

My Belgariad covers are all surprisingly accurate. One features a small redheaded girl in a breastplate with hilariously exaggerated breasts, for instance. They all have '80s hair, though.