The Positivity Cover Art Thread

Book publishers don't have marketing focus groups. Basically, all it takes is one or two books with a hooded figure on the cover to do reasonably well and they'll reproduce them awhile like rabbits. Although I doubt it was the first one, the hooded figure cover for Karen Miller's Innocent Mage was widely circulated and probably contributed. Your red tapestry one, Peter, came from the period when they were doing a lot of ancient paper with writing, block of color with runes, etc. sort of covers, which worked well for Scott Bakker and Joe Abercrombie. Also popular now, especially for the contemporary fantasy novels, is the photographed figure look that we saw on the Greywalker cover below.

Ari Marmell's cover, with the gal hanging upside down, marks a possible new experiment that got kicked off with the lovely cover for Jay Lake's Green:



I'm seeing more people in weird positions, so that's probably going to continue. Also trending up -- somewhat blurry, watercolor style cover art, such as the Engines of the Apocalypse cover below, and purpley Thistle Down by Irene Radford from DAW:



And Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs from Night Shade, which I really like:



And the covers they've been doing for Adrian Tchaikovsky's Empire series, though those are a little less watercolor, little more oil paint:

 

I'm sorry, and I realize this is the positivity thread, but really with this one? I received a review copy and in "real life" the book doesn't look quite so good.

 

1) Positivity includes no girl cooties complaints. You're off topic.

2) I used it as an example of a cover art trend, and I like the colors and the way the figure is blurred into the tree.

3) The book cover and the book are not the same thing.

4) A comic fantasy about a leukemia survivor whose life is upended by the pixie who helped her as a child is going to be twee, dude. Don't review it if you don't want to.

 

Ok, I'll try to be positive about the cover.
The colors come together fairly well and they do pop fairly nicely. I suspect it would stand out on the shelf of new releases at Barnes & Noble where all the covers are face out. In that respect the book cover has likely done its job.

On the other hand, it almost almost looks like a self-published cover. I think if the letters were foil raised in silver, then the cover would really be up a notch or two.

But....how are the book cover and the book not essentially the same thing? The cover is part of the book, physically it is probably the most important thing about the book used to sell the book, no?

Not sure where the girl cooties comment came from as I mentioned nothing about the figure on the cover or the girl or the fact that the author was a woman. At least until the previous sentence.

 

Well no, they are not the same thing as we've often seen. The first Gardens of the Moon cover featured a character who doesn't exist in the book. We've had YA covers of books with non-white protagonists that get white-washed with white figures on the covers. Authors have discovered all sorts of weird things about their covers. My favorite is John Scalzi talking about the German book cover to his SF novel, Agent to the Stars:

So they're not the same. You might very much like a book and hate the cover art, or love the cover and not particularly like the book. It's hoped that the cover art will attract passing people and represent the book well, but no one oversees art departments.

I will retract the girl cooties comment since your concern is that the book cover art is crude in nature. But again, I think they're using the watercolor style, and while the positioning of the woman's figure is perhaps a bit off with the Greek vase pose, again I like what they did with the colors and the blurring. I like the Southern Gods one a good bit more, but that one wasn't quite as blurry, which was the point I was making at the time. That being said, on the book front, I like the idea of pixies accidentally causing havoc.

 

I think it's better than the previous version for that book, though the previous version looked pretty good. The way she's perched in an aggressive pose better matches the first book cover in the series perhaps.

The woman on the cover could faintly be a number of characters, but the consensus seemed to be that she didn't actually fit any of the female characters, and that the background stuff didn't make a lot of sense.

We have contemporary fantasy covers with characters wearing leather and the character doesn't wear leather in the book. Sometimes they get the hair color wrong. In general, they're decently careful with cover art, but you can't absolutely rely on a book cover to tell you stuff about the book. On occasion, an author has had to make some mild changes in a book to match the cover (I had this happen to a pal of mine.) The worse bit is the whitewashing that has occurred, but Internet campaigns seem to be discouraging that somewhat. So they're not the same, necessarily, but they're fun.

That orange always stood out. They reissued a bunch and put a few more modern novels in the look a few years ago in celebration of their anniversary, so you can probably find some of them still around. They like to do cartoon and drawing illustrations on them now.

 

Um, do you realize how many books Penguin does for their education imprint? Everyone from China Mieville to Edgar Allen Poe. Surely they'd have a few authors you'd like.