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Book Covers
Over in the audiobook, I read a review of an audiobook that sounded interesting, so I checked it out in the kindle store. It was the 5th in a series, so I went to the 1st of the series. It's a Tor book, but didn't really ring any bells. Looking at it, I realized that the style of the book cover was a style that I associated with a type of book that I've tried in the past but didn't like, so I had just glided over it.
That got me to thinking. In the genres that I read, most imprints tend to have a unique style of cover art for most of the books published by that imprint during a certain time period. Perhaps it's because they had an artist they used for most of their covers, but if you put out all the SF&F books published in 1990, you could likely sort them out by imprint just based on the cover.
Back in the good old days, when I went to books stores, I would scan the new books and much of the time, the first thing I noticed was the book cover. I would think, "that looks interesting" before I had actually picked up the book and looked at the blurb on the back.
I do that now with ebooks. As I scan the SF&F books in the Amazon list (or Apple for that matter), if the book cover is Manga inspired, I just skip past it. That implies a style of indie that I just don't find interesting. If it's a picture of the author's girlfriend dressed up as a character in the book, well forget it.
I think that if I were an indie, I would definitely budget money to get a professional done cover rather than some guy off the internet who will do it for $250.
So what say you? Are book covers the first thing that catches your eye? Do you categorize books based on their cover?
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