In May, I mentioned a writer’s thoughts on what the rise of the e-book would mean for book covers. Today I found an article considering what badly-designed covers mean for particular e-books.
We reported in March on agent Sonia Land’s deal to publish Catherine Cookson’s backlist digitally through Amazon, bypassing Cookson’s print publishers altogether. On Futurebook a few days ago, Simon Appleby posted a column poking fun at the e-books’ frankly hideous covers.
Essentially, all the book covers look more or less like the one posted at left; the only differences are the title and the background color. “[T]he only way these jackets could look any worse,” Appleby writes, “would be if the designer had used Comic Sans for the book titles.” He presents this as a reason that e-books still need real professional publishers behind them: they can do a better job with the cover art.
But as one of the reader comments to the article points out, this is a straw man—plenty of authors hate the covers their publishers have come up with, after all, and there have also been plenty of self- or indie-published books with great covers. Land’s Cookson republications don’t have lousy covers because they weren’t put out by a major publisher; they have lousy covers because Land apparently felt they didn’t need anything better.
And thinking about it, she would kind of have a point there. These are backlist titles by a dead author; the bloom is well off the rose of their best-seller days, the books long since “earned out”, and anything they make now is “found money”. Since they’re not on display in a physical bookstore where people could be attracted to them by passing by, it’s not as important that they look nice. It might be true that seeing a nice-looking cover image in the Kindle store might make someone more likely to buy them, but they’ve got sufficient name recognition from the author’s name that plenty of people will buy them in spite of the crummy covers.
Apparently Land’s cost-benefit analysis determined that better covers would not generate enough more sales to make the cost of commissioning the covers worthwhile—especially since there were almost a hundred of these books that would have needed them.
The fuss over better covers kind of amuses me, because I bought a lot of my e-books from Peanut Press/Palm Digital Media/eReader in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, and almost none of those books had a cover. (And when they did, due to limitations of the e-book format, it was a grainy low-resolution thing that didn’t look good enough to justify the cost in added file size to put it on.) But I didn’t care. I could google the cover image if I wanted to look at it. I bought the e-book because it was full of words. It’s kind of silly to worry about an e-book cover anyway—people who buy an e-book won’t even see the cover most of the time—they’ll be reading what’s behind it.
With ebooks, why do they call them covers? What do they cover? There is a design problem involved with covers. You can’t fit the title and author’s name reasonably in the 150×150 or 200×200 dimensions often found on Amazon and other online booksellers. Robert Nagle http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/
What a backwards lazy way to think. Does this person honestly believe that the whole world uses Kindles? Boy will they be surprised when they find out most people are buying tablets with ful color screens and yes we do see crappy covers and tend not to buy them. People still buy products that look nice even eBooks. What is so hard to understand about that? If I see some author pumping out eBook after eBook with crappy covers I tend to think they do not care, I do not think I am alone in that thinking. This type of thinking promotes a slipshod attitude towards eBooks.
I’ve written on this issue numerous times–even including it in my ‘Top Ten Tips for Newbie Fiction Writers’ free course on Scribd–that eBooks must adhere to the stringent rules of good effort and good design, not to mention as changing consumer tastes. My novelist hat aside, just as a professional book reviewer I’ve come across numerous ebook covers (and self-published paper book covers) with horribly crowded design, pixelated images, cheesy clipart or the good-heavens-not-again PAPYRUS font… and yet the prose contained therein was good, even great. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Just ask the automotive industry if “the inside” of the car is all that matters.
Thank you for sharing, Chris. I wonder if the last sentence has any kind of evidence at all, though. I can’t see how most readers would not see the cover. Isn’t the thumbnail part of the purchasing experience most of the time?
I’ve seen multiple professional writers blog about how they need a good ebook cover to sell well. It seems to be the accepted practice. I personally DO NOT CARE about the cover. Don’t waste your money putting a cover on it for me. Does it really matter to others? I don’t know, but in my book buying past I’ve purchased thousands of books without regards to the cover, when I bought paper books, most of them were shelved with the spine out. When I started purchasing ebooks, I bought them from Fictionwise’s New Releases page which didn’t show covers. Now I’ve even started a blog to browse ebooks in a long list, without covers, because I find Amazon’s interface slows down my ability to find good new ebooks, because it insists on putting covers out and displaying 10 books at a time. The things are I care about when shopping for books are, The Author, The Title and The Price. It all depends on how much you are going to make, vs how much a good cover will cost. I don’t know how much a professional designer will charge to do a cover, however if it eats up a large percentage of your profit then you might be better off just going with a horribly crowded, pixelated, cheesy cover with Papyrus font. Of course we might be the outliers since we go against conventional wisdom.