Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I'm not a consumer of indies, but if I were, a crummy cover would be a deal breaker as indicative of an author who couldn't be bothered to make the requisite effort at any stage.
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That's fair in some ways. But in other ways... not really. It's hard for me to believe that a big-name traditional publisher puts any more
effort than an indie author does into their cover art (and nowadays, the tradpub author likely puts exactly
zero effort into their covers).
What it boils down to for me, is that trad-pub simply has more
money to throw at cover art than the the indie author does. Effort be damned. And while visible genre indicators are certainly fair game for filtering, it's difficult for me to punish an author for what might be considered a "bad" cover--tradpub or indie. Not when considering that the first had no say, and the latter had no money (or no visual-art skills, if they chose to do it themselves--for love, or money savings).
Either way ... still seems like ignoring covers is the better option for my personal new-book-discovery practices. Buying a book I don't like at all is always a possibility. Even with the shiniest, most lovely--and very likely utterly unrelated--baubles adorning them. And I'm not willing to judge an indie author's
effort on a cover by tradpub-money's
results. Especially not when both (money and effort spent) are equally un-indicative of the writing chops contained therein.
I'm not trying to convince anyone that ignoring covers is "better," by the way. I'm just trying to convince perhaps a few that correlating bad cover-art to shoddy writing (or great art to
better writing) when looking for new books (e or p) is probably not as "default" (much less
reasonable) a behavior as they believed it to be.