Cover Versions

What makes a good book cover? Is it one that depicts what you can expect to find in the pages that it surrounds or should it be a little more obscure, teasing the reader a little?

There are basically three kinds of covers: Those that show the reader exactly what to expect in the book, those that deliberately try to be obscure and those that show nothing whatsoever. Which one is best? Well I guess that depends on the book and the reader.

The Harry Potter cover art was always a painted image of a scene from the novel. It was something to point the reader at a little something that they could expect. A wizard flying on a broomstick, taking a trip on a steam train or fighting a dragon. It showed an exciting world that the reader would hopefully be attracted to.

On the other hand a dull, colourless picture of a necktie with the accompanying title in a very plain Times New Roman font doesn’t sound like it would make an enticing cover, but it hasn’t done Fifty Shades of Grey any harm. A case could be made for the opposite in fact, that the sheer inoffensive and bland nature of the book’s cover hid its erotic content (at least in the early days before every ‘naughty mummy’ in the country owned a copy) and meant that reading it on the bus was a distinct possibility.

Or perhaps cover designers should take the Dan Brown route of just a small teaser picture of something vaguely relating to the story with the rest of the cover being deliberately obscure. That seems to have worked for him. And there are any number of best sellers that have featured no image whatsoever on the front, just the title of the work and the author’s name.

So a book’s front art doesn’t have to be too obvious, but neither does it necessarily have to be so obscure as to bear no relation to the contents. Ultimately a book cover has one purpose and that is to make the casual browser become interested enough to pick the volume up or click a link to find out more about it. If a potential reader doesn’t even look past that initial glance then the writer certainly won’t be making a sale.

All this is leading, of course, to the fact that I need a cover for my upcoming novel. There are a world of options.