Always judge a book by its cover.

Thoughts on book cover aesthetics, movie posters, stickers, and other terrible things.

by Julie Allan

“Never Judge a Book by Its Cover” 

Whether you are a reader or not, every person has been told at some point to “Never judge a book by its cover.” However this advice should be applied to anything but books. 

As an illustrator myself I can assure you that it is quite the opposite, and I urge you to please judge a book by its cover. The Illustrator or designer’s  job, if done properly, is exactly to make a book easy for readers to judge. A good cover illustration will allow you to discern the contents of the book itself. 

From the early stages of publishing to being purchased and stacked in a bookshelf at home, the cover is one of the defining aspects of a book. During the editorial process, a cover design goes through several stages of strategic planning, keeping in mind the target audience, marketing strategies and trends, style, tone, genre, among other aspects particular to each specific story. 

A cover is the first impression a book leaves on the reader. If that first impression isn’t good, that skewers the reader's opinion on the contents as well. In the end what you are judging isn’t the quality of the books but rather judging the type of story you will be reading; and inference, if you will, rather than a “judgment”. 

Now, of course this can work both in favor and disfavor of the book. Many people, myself included, would initially ignore a book if the cover is not particularly pleasing. That is not to say these people are as superficial as the “never judge a book by its cover” advice seems to mean, but rather that we are not initially visually attracted to the book, which results in a lack of interest to investigate its contents. 

“There is a reason why dating apps work. No matter what people say, first impressions do make an impact. People do judge a book by its cover.”

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: Why Beautiful-Looking Products are Preferred Over Usable But Not So Beautiful Ones, Abhishek Chakraborty

That being said here are some of my opinions in the matters of Book covers: 

Shirtless men 

During a book club meeting, I brought up the subject of book covers to our members and we came to a few conclusions, and a few disagreements.

 First of all the entirety of the group agreed on books with shirtless men in the cover. This was the first unanimous vote, we all absolutely hate those. The conclusion we all seemed to get to was that all these books had a similar content. Simply from that visual queue the reader could infer what they would get from the reading of that book, and most of us decided against it, resulting in never even picking up a book with that cover. This being a clear example of what first impression this book cover leaves on the audience. 

Others claimed that they never picked up one of those books, not from lack of interest in its contents, but rather from the fear of what people around them would think. If you are reading a book that looks like that, everyone knows what you are reading… and in the end, we agreed none of us would be caught dead with a book like that in our hands. 

Movie Posters 

Now, this topic was slightly more divisive. Now keep it in mind that we are not discussing the merits of books vs movies (that is a topic for another article) but rather the visual quality of a book cover that is directly taken from the movie poster. I, personally, am not a fan. Even if a movie was very good and the actors look great, I don’t enjoy the visual mixing of the media; let books be books and movies be movies, they can be connected without having the same visual identity. 

To my surprise, not every club member had the same repulsion towards movie-poster book covers as I did. Some of them said they didn’t mind if the cover was a movie poster as long as it looked nice. Some brought up versions of Pride and Prejudice, or Me Before you, and the Bridgerton books that did a decent enough job of redesigning the books to include their TV equivalents on the cover. But other members agreed with me that they would much rather scavenge for the older editions, that came out before the movie, to escape the “moviefication” of the cover. 

Permanent Stickers 

Another point of consensus was our hatred for permanent stickers. Those annoying “stickers” that don’t quite earn that name since they aren’t stuck to the cover but rather printed on it. The “movie adaptation coming soon” or “Someone famous’s Book Club pick” advertising for a streaming service, club, subscription, release, series, etc. These stickers are absolutely unbearable and should be stopped. Please. 

Not too long ago I came across an online shop that made stickers to cover these permanent stickers and matched the background of the book. What a life saver! This only serves to show how much readers hate them; that they would go to such lengths as design custom stickers to hide it. 

Bland Illustrations, Photographs and other preferences

I am sorry to say this, because I am a full supporter of illustrations on book covers, but I can’t take one more romance book with Illustrations that look the exact same. Usually one flat color in the background (an over saturated hue at that) with two flat characters; no shading or details. The title is usually a playful typeface across the cover, saying some generic three words that vaguely relate to the plot, maybe a season or a food. Can we agree this has been overdone? I would love to see some more diversity in the styles of cover Illustration. It feels like the same cover over and over again. In the end that is just my personal grievance as an Illustrator, I know there are a lot of people who like them. 

And finally my perhaps most unpopular opinion; I don’t like covers with photographs, especially of people. I do have exceptions, of course, there are many photograph covers that are amazing; but usually only when mixed with a great design to integrate it to the book. Usually I opt for covers with artwork or interesting design. And I know many of the readers I spoke to agreed with this opinion, but were less picky than me. 

Of course it is all up to the reader to judge the book; initially by its cover, but in the end, and more importantly, by its contents.