4 ms·

I've seen great books ruined by their cover. And with them, authors who had dedicated years of their life to what turned out to be a great story, but not a grea

by dsign 3y ago

I've seen great books ruined by their cover. And with them, authors who had dedicated years of their life to what turned out to be a great story, but not a great book--because of the cover. That's why I tend to read blurbs and get an idea of the subject matter, instead of putting much attention on the cover. Alas, it takes longer to read blurbs :/ My personal opinion is that a good cover should, in this order, do the following: - Bring a mystery to the reader, or summarize the story in a fun way. - Be honest, and tell the reader if the story is for them or not. If the story is fun, philosophical, and gay, there should be cues of that on the cover. It's a service you do to yourself as a writer, specially when you are not writing mainstream. Here's an example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HX3wweY3S_Zpf1iD7a118IWNy96HGD5a/view?usp=drive_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HX3wweY3S_Zpf1iD7a118IWNy96... - Be visually pleasant. - Distant forth: be "trendy". The cover should do service to the book and the story first, and only in a second place, be a resume piece for the graphical designer. With that said, most books don't make money, and sometimes the only way a writer can get a cover at a reasonable price is by compromising and letting the graphical artist do what they want.

cosmojg 3y ago
> Alas, it takes longer to read blurbs :/ Tangential thought, but this sounds like it might make for an actually good application of large language models: reading blurbs (or entire books) and making recommendations accordingly.
- creer 3y ago
  Yes! Only slightly joking: The AI overlords might become useful after all (to us - they can do what they want when they are on the clock) by doing a better job of lining up novels for our consumption. They might even customize them on the fly. For example fixing the characters' gender to something they know we will prefer. For that matter, they might edit some authors. Who greatly need it. That brings us back to misleading blurbs. They will have to fix that too - which they can, by reading the thing before we do.
creer 3y ago
Aren't there just plain too many books by now to browse? And the few browsable places are carrying fewer and fewer of them. (And I have complained before about online stores and library catalogs not being very browsable yet.) And so I switched completely to third party recommendations. Sometimes very tenuous - but still better than other methods. I keep a deep file of notes such as "police in exotic places", "commando/secret agent/police stories from Egypt" - or "time travel, magic and bureaucracy". In parallel, I keep notes on authors' writing style. I can then favor the ones I usually like and push down the list the ones that get on my nerves. The cover is now irrelevant. - But perhaps will come back in some variant when catalogs become browsable again. Perhaps the new format will allow several images rather than just one. Perhaps will completely separate title and author from the cover? Will allow more than author and story blurbs? How will the cover evolve for the online-first world?
BobaFloutist 3y ago
But it's unfortunately beneficial to sell books to people that won't ultimately enjoy them, so your second point illustrates part of the problem.
kridsdale3 3y ago
It looks like you're missing the number one most important factor in cover design: Embed in to the image a large NETFLIX logo and add some text "HEY THIS BOOK IS WHAT THAT SHOW IS BASED ON". People love to reflect back on that, 10 years from now.

by dsign 3y ago

cosmojg 3y ago

> Alas, it takes longer to read blurbs :/ Tangential thought, but this sounds like it might make for an actually good application of large language models: reading blurbs (or entire books) and making recommendations accordingly.

creer 3y ago
Yes! Only slightly joking: The AI overlords might become useful after all (to us - they can do what they want when they are on the clock) by doing a better job of lining up novels for our consumption. They might even customize them on the fly. For example fixing the characters' gender to something they know we will prefer. For that matter, they might edit some authors. Who greatly need it. That brings us back to misleading blurbs. They will have to fix that too - which they can, by reading the thing before we do.

creer 3y ago

Aren't there just plain too many books by now to browse? And the few browsable places are carrying fewer and fewer of them. (And I have complained before about online stores and library catalogs not being very browsable yet.) And so I switched completely to third party recommendations. Sometimes very tenuous - but still better than other methods. I keep a deep file of notes such as "police in exotic places", "commando/secret agent/police stories from Egypt" - or "time travel, magic and bureaucracy". In parallel, I keep notes on authors' writing style. I can then favor the ones I usually like and push down the list the ones that get on my nerves. The cover is now irrelevant. - But perhaps will come back in some variant when catalogs become browsable again. Perhaps the new format will allow several images rather than just one. Perhaps will completely separate title and author from the cover? Will allow more than author and story blurbs? How will the cover evolve for the online-first world?

BobaFloutist 3y ago

But it's unfortunately beneficial to sell books to people that won't ultimately enjoy them, so your second point illustrates part of the problem.

kridsdale3 3y ago

It looks like you're missing the number one most important factor in cover design: Embed in to the image a large NETFLIX logo and add some text "HEY THIS BOOK IS WHAT THAT SHOW IS BASED ON". People love to reflect back on that, 10 years from now.