Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I disagree. When you do a cover vote, you look at how good the cover is. But unfortunately in a lot of cases, it's popularity contest and the covers don't actually matter. Like what happened on Goodreads with their cover poll.
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If I understand your post correctly, you object to book cover popularity contests* because you believe they often become content popularity contests. I suspect a formal study would find such a correlation exists, but cause and effect could be harder to isolate.
It is possible that a book gained popularity as a result of its attractive cover. It is possible that a cover looks attractive to people because it matches other books in a popular genre and so just becomes a refinement of something people already associate with enjoyment. And speaking of associations, think Pavlov's dogs: "every time I picked up that image I had a good time so I find that image attractive", sort of thing.
* Any contest that looks only at the cover image without considering whether it is appropriate to the content is not looking for good covers, it is only looking for popular covers.