Covers

I was trying to think of a topic for today’s post and came up with covers. No, not the kind where your band plays a song from another band. Book covers. This is a book blog. Maybe someday I’ll have a music blog, too, but for now we’re going to talk about book covers. There’s a fantasy writer who has their own site and is also a contributing blogger on another site. Weekly they’ll tout new SF&F books and I scroll through the list to see what’s new and exciting. I made the remark to someone the other day that I don’t like most of the covers in those weekly posts. Granted, I try to be flexible when it comes to self-publishing. I know it costs money to make a professional-looking cover. And then I thought to myself, self, why don’t you like those covers? What is it about them? A couple of things. First, the fonts are horrible. In many cases, the fonts don’t match the style of the book or even the picture on the cover. It’s like when Microsoft Word first came out and people could format their cover sheets and documents with any font in the world and it was chaos. That’s what these covers look like. The second reason I don’t like them is the art. Let’s be clear, I’m not an artist or an expert on art, but as with most people, even though I can’t define what art I like, I know what I don’t. Many of the covers just look…amateurish. No depth, or looks like someone cobbled together bits and pieces to make a cover that reminds me of trying to make a car out of spare parts. It might work, but it sure ain’t going to be pretty. I don’t want to pick on just SF&F books, either. I’ve looked through sites for Romance books, the category for Next Time, and there are plenty of horrendous covers there as well. I’ll talk about this more in my next post, but really, if we as authors put all that effort and time into writing a book, we should put the additional effort into making it look good.