Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
There's no need to be sorry. You're not telling me anything that I don't already know. You're not even addressing any of my points. I KNOW covers are vitally important to selling books. I'm not an idiot. I KNOW the vast majority of readers out there are probably heavily influenced by them in some way or another. I don't live under a rock for cripes sake. The only things I've claimed are:
1) covers don't have much of an impact on me--never really have (and yes, I AM the final authority on that no matter whether anyone chooses to believe me or not).
2) covers offer zero insight into how well an author writes.
3) dismissing the writing skills of authors based on the artwork adorning their work alone is not logical.
That's it. No one, myself included, has argued that great covers won't help sell more books. Why would they? Some of us have merely claimed that we're much less influenced by them than others, and that the "effort" of an author that chooses their own cover art cannot (CANNOT) be objectively compared to the effort of an author who's had to make no effort regarding the same. Not "cannot be compared." But "cannot be objectively" compared.
There's a world of difference between talking about "how things are" and trying to defend the notion that "how things are" makes perfect logical sense.
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AKSHUALLY...
I was only addressing that one line to you, individually. I should have been clearer.
I wasn't defending the idea that "how things are" makes perfect logical sense. S**t, Doug, I was talking about how people react to covers, which is emotional--by defintion, not logic. Right?
I'm saying only that your approach to book-buying is not necessarily the way that the majority of buyers approach it and my own experience--for what that's worth!--indicates that the majority seem to buy based on what their eyes see first. You're clearly not in that category.
I
agree that it's illogical to dismiss the writing of an author based upon his cover. (Hmmm...that's an interesting theory to test out. Anyone here with an abundance of time on his or her hands, that wants to do a random survey, at Amazon, of crappy covers versus good covers--and yes, of course, that's subjective, too--to see if that theory holds? Wolfie, dear, you're not busy,
right???? While we can all argue over "good/bad" for cover design and "good/bad" for writing, perhaps we could agree on some subjective standard, e.g., lousy formatting, or 5+ typos on the first page, or something that, to equal "bad." [In case it's not clear, I'm riffing a bit here...])
When I volunteer time over at CoverCritics.com, one of my lines is "your cover is clickbait." To me, that's the simplest, easiest, most accurate way to describe the job of a cover. Once someone's clicked, its job is done. But getting that click--
priceless, as the commercials say. :-)
And I'm 99.9999% sure that there's nothing logical about any of it. I don't
think that I said that there was? Did I? Gosh, I'm getting senile, to (apparently) forget that I said that, so soon after (presumably) typing it!
Hitch