[Mugwump]

There’s an old saying that you should never judge a book by its cover, but do we always follow this advice?

Just how important is a good front cover in your opinion? Do you take any notice at all? Does an imaginative and, more importantly, evocative piece of cover art help shape your perception of a story from the very beginning, or do you depend entirely upon the text to induce imagery? Can a dull or irrelevant front cover kill a book's chances at the newsstand or even detract from your enjoyment of a book (think hard about this one)?

Is today’s SF cover art ‘better’ or ‘worse’ that that of yesteryear?

I’d like your opinions on this intriguing topic please, and if you have any examples of great SF cover art please post them.

[Dawnstorm]

I've never taken much notice of SF covers, mostly because when I started buying my paper-back novels, the covers were pretty much irrelevant to the contents of the book. Things seem to have gotten better, though. However, I still don't take much note; old habits die hard.

Interesting topic, though. :)

[Clarkesworld]

A cover might make me take a look at a book I wouldn't have normally, but I've never bought a book because of the cover. It's just an ad for the book.

Some of my favorite books have covers that just don't appeal to me.

-Neil

[Colonel Worf]

The cover usually means absolutely nothing to me. It's the synopsis on the back or on the jacket that makes me decide if I want to read it or not.

[Mugwump]

Just to clarify things: whilst it's a fairly interesting issue, I'm not necessarily concerned about whether or not a piece of good 'cover art' has influenced your decision on buying a particular book (although I’m quite sure that this happens more often than people would like to admit). What I would like to know is whether a piece of cover art has influenced your perception of a story?

Do you find that you subconsciously draw from aspects of the cover art, and that these fragments somehow ‘bleed’ into your imagination over the course of the story?

Take the works of PKD for example. Anyone with a general knowledge of his work can be quite confident in saying that his environments are usually pretty similar i.e. they are all based upon a perception of 50’s and early 60’s California (with a healthy dose of paranoia thrown in for good measure).

In truth, Dick is can be so far removed from the traditional perception of SF at times, you might as well be reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for all the relevance it has.

Now, take a moment to consider the following piece wonderful cover art for PKD’s Ubik, released under the SF Masterworks Collection:

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1857988531.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

At first glance, this cover appears to have absolutely nothing in common with the story. The young lady staring at us with an expression of fear, paranoia (or perhaps playfulness?) doesn’t, in my opinion, bear any resemblance to the main female characters in the story (Pat and Ella Runciter). Certainly the space rocket and the landing dock are not consistent with Dick’s descriptions when Joe Chip returns from the moon, and the sickly green/yellow foreboding sky doesn’t match with Dick’s descriptions either.

But, and this is my point: when I started thumbing my way through Ubik, I found that the mesmeric front cover had left such an impression on my mind, I couldn’t detach it from the story. It was almost as if my mind had convinced itself that the story was taking place in the environment depicted on the front cover. In my mind, when Joe Chip returned from the moon, he returned to a surreal earth, where the sky was a sickly yellow, where the landing dock was rain-drenched and abandoned.

Now consider the following piece of (IMO, very bad, as it looks cheap and evokes little) cover art for the same story:

http://www.sfsite.com/grx/pkd/ubik.jpg

I have absolutely no doubt that if I had read this book as opposed to the SF Masterworks version I would have perceived the story differently. All because of a different cover!

Has anyone else encountered this strange phenomenon, or am I a complete freak?

[emohawk]

It's funny, when I read the title of the thread the first thing that popped into my mind was the SF Masterworks cover of Ubik and that I thought the same thing when I read it - the depiction doesn't really mirror the events of the novel yet it still suits the tone of it. Most of the covers of the SF Masterworks series are really gorgeous and are one of the reasons I decided to collect the whole set, irrespective of the individual titles (fortunately 95% of them are excellent novels).

I think subconsciously we do make impressions of a novel before we read it based on covers (at least if they contain artwork) and you make a very valid point.

Probably the worst cover I have in my (largish) collection is the current iBooks edition of Dying Inside.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000063VMD.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I can't think of a less appropriate cover, except maybe spaceships and laser guns. When I've bought people copies of it or leant it out I've had to tell them to completely disregard the cover art because it has absolutely nothing to do with the novel on any level, and actually detracts from it and gives a bad impression. It's a real pity because I'd have to name Dying Inside as one of my favourite couple of novels.

[Mugwump]

It's interesting to note that the artist for UBIK (Chris Moore) appears to have opted for a somewhat retro (almost noirish) SF front cover, which harks back to a particular kind of artwork which was prevalent in the 60's and 70's.

In a way, I feel that this attempt to play on nostalgia is one of the reasons why it works, as contemporary artwork, with its frigid functionality tends to leave me feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

Compare these two front covers for Frank Herbert's Dune:

http://www.tomandmaria.com/st197/images/old%20dune%20cover.jpg

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0399128964.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

The first cover is redolent with atmosphere and the exotic - instantly recognisable and it certainly impacted upon my perception of the story.

The second offers the reader nothing, and is ... well ... quite awful.

[Dawnstorm]

Originally posted by Mugwump
The first cover is redolent with atmosphere and the exotic - instantly recognisable and it certainly impacted upon my perception of the story.

The second offers the reader nothing, and is ... well ... quite awful.

Really? I'd say the first one gives the Dune setting a bit of a mundane feeling, while the second one is brilliantly suggestive. (But then I've read the book before seeing that cover.)

Can't remember the cover of my version (borrowed it from a friend) anymore, though. Think it was a portrait of someone...

[KatG]

Hardcore fans generally don't care much about cover art, though they may appreciate it independently as many sf/f artists have become stars in their own right. But publishers are with cover art trying to influence the perceptions of booksellers and of people who are not hardcore fans, but who may buy the book because the cover not only catches their eye but says something about what type of book the work is.

When George R.R. Martin's fantasy work A Game of Thrones came out, his publishers rightly felt he might hit as big as Jordan with the series. Because they felt they would already have the fan base in the genre, and because Martin is an experienced screenwriter which was a factor they might be able to exploit, the publisher went after a "crossover" audience. They forwent the usual fantasy artwork and gave the book a mainstream, historical novel look that they hoped would appeal to non-genre buyers. While the book was successfully launched, the crossover audience did not go for the plain gray cover and some of the fan audience was miffed. So for the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, they added traditional fantasy art but they kept it small in a boxed frame, keeping the historical novel look to the rest of the cover.

When they came out with Neal Stephenson's Cryptomonicon, they also wanted the cross-over audience and gave the work a conservative, non-art cover that could just as easily have been for a thriller or historical novel. Cryptomonicon did enjoy cross-over success. How much of that was due to the cover art attracting non-sf readers is hard to say.

When I worked for NAL, we had a guy, W.R. Philbrick, writing a nice thriller detective series. Miami Vice was big then, so they gave the covers a Miami Vice look, with guns and neon colors and such, and they found out later that this might have actually hurt sales of the book, causing people to dismiss the series as just another Miami Vice rip-off. Around that time was also the gold foil epidemic, with everyone putting gold or silver metallic foil elements to their covers. So many covers had the foil, that then publishers stopped using it since it no longer stood out.

In recent years, literary novels have been getting covers that are more arty, less plain, to try to catch people's attention, while romance is trying to un-categorize itself and attract women who wouldn't normally be caught dead buying a romance by dumping the bodice-ripper art and going for plain covers in bright, jaunty colors or with little sixties-like drawings. All of these cover trends are strategies by publishers to try to attract the attention of potential buyers.

So yeah, covers can have an impact. For myself, the cover art doesn't usually shape my impression of the story, but if characters from the work are pictured on the cover, I do admit that I tend to imagine those characters as looking like the illustration, unless the illustration widely deviates from the character description. So I don't think you're crazy, no.

Cover art can make a book stick in someone's memory and can lull someone into buying a book expecting things that might not actually be in the book. But given that a lot of cover art is quite plain, with emphasis given to title and author name over artwork, its effects may be limited. SF used to have very plain covers, but then jazzed them up with artwork to catch people's attention (and perhaps to compete with art-heavy fantasy on the same shelves.) Where they go from here depends largely on what publishers think will stand out and help move the book.

[Mugwump]

Originally posted by Dawnstorm


Really? I'd say the first one gives the Dune setting a bit of a mundane feeling, while the second one is brilliantly suggestive. (But then I've read the book before seeing that cover.)

Can't remember the cover of my version (borrowed it from a friend) anymore, though. Think it was a portrait of someone...

I can't stand most of the contemporary Dune artwork and have sold many of my newer books on for the older editions with, IMO, far more evocative (not to mention - colourful!) front covers.

http://pictures.abebooks.com/SMILESBOOKS/192981568.jpg

Superb! :D

As for the more modern SF novels: I do feel that publishers now seem to be choosing artwork that is less likely to put people 'off' at the counter as opposed to taking a chance with something a touch more extravagant and risky.