The saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has been around forever, but let’s be honest: do we really stick to it when choosing our next read? I’ve certainly been swayed by beautiful covers and overlooked some great reads with unimpressive ones. What’s your take on this? Have you ever let a book’s cover dictate your reading choices, and what memorable surprises have you found when you decided to look beyond it?
by MadMaxine666
16 Comments
Reminds me of a fragment in Robert Eaglestone’s *Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction,* when discussing the concept of genre:
>At first, genre, which basically just means ‘type’, looks relatively innocuous. In the case of contemporary fiction, it looks as if it’s simply the ‘pigeonhole’ into which different sorts of novels are placed: science fiction, ‘chicklit’, historical fiction, thrillers, and so on. Bookshops and libraries need to know which shelves to place books on; book jacket designers need to know what to put on the cover **(you can always judge a contemporary novel book by its cover: indeed, there is huge sub-industry just devoted to making this possible)**; teachers need to know where books go. It’s almost as if everyone involved in the strange institution is keen to fit books into neat categories.
Books are always written with an audience in mind, publishers pick up books based on that and create covers that will attract this audience. For most people it should be easy to see what kind of content a book has based on its cover. There are exceptions, like always, but it would be extremely rare that I would pick a YA book by mistake, thinking by the cover it was actual literature.
I suppose it’s a matter of how we define “judge”. I don’t think I typically “judge” a book by the cover. I don’t think I’ve ever said to myself, “This book gets an automatic 1-star rating because the cover is ugly, so I’m not gonna read it”.
That said, I *have* been enticed to look into a book because of an eye-catching cover. Catchy and/or pithy titles can entice me, too.
Zero impact. Cover doesn’t matter to me. When I see a cover I dont understand it, once I read the book I do, and it makes sense most of the time after reading it.
Books that don’t have any images in the cover do attract my atention. The aniversary edition of “Rayuela” was black on white, and it instantly caught my eye. Perhaps we are bombarded by media so much that simplicity has become the exception.
Nope. I despise all marketing. First and last sentence are my go-to evaluation method. If they catch me, the book is mine.
No, because I get my recommendations from ChatGPT. It’s pretty awesome. If you feed it 10-20 of your favorite books you’ll get a rock solid list.
Yes. It’s very likely that I’ll ignore any book that has even a single person on the cover.
Not sure if my case really fits this discussion, but for very long time I was putting of buying “Roadside Picnic” by Strugatsky brothers, because every edition I find has cover based on Stalker game series.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Stalker, but for some reason it infuriates me to see it on cover of a book that games used as loose inspiration.
After about 10 years I gave up on finding nice looking standalone and simply bought compilation of their novels. More fun reading for me and at least the cover looks nice.
I do but I still read the synopsis before making a final decision.
Sometimes they catch my eye – it’s how I discovered the greatness of Tim Dorsey!
Absolutely. It’s hard because i love scifi and scifi covers are often ridiculous looking 😂 my judging list goes : title, cover, blurb, names of characters. I’m willing to overlook a less than stellar cover or title if the other factors are amazing despite this ranking.
Even though we all know this judgement, we can’t avoid it. Book cover catches the eyes in first time. It is some kind of first impression.
No. But sometimes the title. Had to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Of course. A poorly-made cover is a reflection of the book inside. If I see a shit cover–especially an indie cover–I’m going to assume that if the author/publisher didn’t care enough to put out a quality cover, they probably didn’t care enough about having an edited book or a tight story. No thanks.
Amazon Prime had a free science fiction book with a shapely & impressively endowed black leather-clad woman on the cover. I probably scrolled past it 20 times looking for free stuff and it kept catching my eye. Since it was free, I clicked on it and pushed it to my Kindle. A year or two later with that book cover taunting me every time I scrolled through the “Uncollected” folder, I decided to read it. It was entertaining fluff so I pulled down the sequel and put myself on the author’s mailing list.
For the record, “Expelled”, first book in the Interplanetary Spy for Hire series by Ell Leigh Clarke. “Exposed” is the sequel. There is no third in the series. I was channeling my inner 15 year old boy.
“All books are judged by their covers until they are read.” -Agatha Swanburne
Yes. I’m not a big fantasy (especially high fantasy) reader or a big dark romance reader. However, I do own a bunch of books in those genres because of the cover art.