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I have recently read in an author forum a post tilted: “Cover Art Fatigue and the Return of Generic Covers?”, where one of them questions whether we have reached cover art saturation with so many indie published books hitting the virtual shelves. He also wonders how a lot of genre eBook icons are starting to look the same and ends up asking whether book covers really matter… As a book cover designer, my answer might sound too obvious… But I would like to elaborate anyway. Book covers do matter. Book cover design is art (of course you will come across awful covers as frequently as badly written books), but a cover complements the book. The cover is to the book what the lyrics are to the music of a song. It is important not only because through the cover, the reader gets an insight of what’s the genre, the topic and other basic information of the book, like its title and author, but because the cover page is not going to leave the readers mind before, during or after reading the book. Each time the reader thinks about the book, it is the book cover what is going to come to his mind while he thinks about it. It is important because it has a significant influence on driving a reader to pick up the book(or click on it) to learn more. At the very same post, one reply by someone that identified himself as a “reader”, stated that he couldn’t care less for book covers, that they didn’t affect him at the time of choosing a book. But the fact is that, while he might not be aware of it, he is actually influenced by the book cover, the same way we are influenced by a COCA-COLA add. We might think that we ordered a Coke just because we felt like it, but Coca-Cola’sMarketing folks know that they are getting their money back big time. The book cover is an advertising tool, and the same way that an alluring book cover attracts a reader, a book cover with a wrong design (and by wrong I don’t mean only poor design, but design mistakes like being offensive, culturally inappropriate or targeting to the wrong audience) may certainly drive readers back. It is also important because it is the one and only chance for the author to transmit the essence of his book to the reader with resources other than the written word. For all this, the challenge of a book cover designer is to create a unique, memorable, witty, artistic and meaningful concept for the book cover, making use of communication drivers like metaphoric images or typographic coups. Do not blame designers if you sense “cover art saturation” and get the recurring feeling that you have seen the same cover in twenty different books. This distortion occurs because too many people (most of them not designers) are sourcing themselves with photographs and graphics from the same online image banks; they just add a title and an author line and put them for sale on a premade book cover catalog. And like if that weren’t enough, most of those premade book cover sellers have not read the source’s user agreement and are not aware of the copyright restrictions that those image banks impose for the use of those images (otherwise they wouldn’t be selling them so cheap, or have so many). Luckily, authors acknowledge the importance of the book cover; the same way none of them would wear jeans in their own wedding or name a child with a random name, they wouldn’t top their work with a generic cover. About the author: Maria NovilloSaravia is a Graphic Designer from FAECC, and is currently co-owner and Art Director at BEAUTeBOOK
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