#4 P2S Link-Up: Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover

We're linking up with Nicole this week from Three31 for our fourth link-up.  It's just about time to get your book packages in the mail and I am so excited to share with all of you!

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The old adage, don't judge a book by its cover, has often been applied to our predetermined judgements of others but what about when it comes to books?  How impactful is a book's cover in our decision in actually purchasing it?  We're a culture that determines a lot of aspects on the cosmetic side of things.  What piece of fruit are you going to eat- the bruised apple or the perfectly ripened mango? 

I'll be the first to admit that I judge a book by its cover- even more so its spine.  There are so many factors that can bring me into actually picking up a book, whether it's a review I saw on Huffbooks, a magazine, an author's typical writing style, or just the fact that the cover looks gorgeous. 

I recently read a post that HuffBooks wrote about gendered covers, and I shared it with a few of the participants that I've been corresponding with.  A female author became incredibly frustrated at the number of male readers who would e-mail or tweet her about the the "girliness" of her book covers.  It inhibited them from reading them in public or sometimes even reading them at all.  This spurred a challenge to readers all over to create a reverse gendered cover.  The results were pretty cool and incredibly artistic.  There were many covers that I thought looked significantly more beautiful or even more captivating than the original covers. It also got me to thinking about a publisher's decision to go with a certain cover artwork.  What if they sold two different covers?  Apart from movie poster covers, has this been done before?  Not as an anniversary edition of a book, but the same book at the same time but two different covers.  It also raises the question of why a book cover exudes gender separation. 

You can walk through a Barnes and Noble and automatically identify the aisles of teen fiction and chick lit.  I don't know about you, but I've noticed this trend in teen fiction/romance where the covers tend to be black with neon blues and remind me of like Sci-Fi art.  For chick lit, I usually see illustrations featuring a woman and the use of softer colors and a title is a curly-q font.  The industry has so heavily branded books, you can just tell.  Like if you see a deep navy cover with handcuffs or a grey tie, it's a series that's trying to bank on the success of 50 Shades.  They even put a chicken on a similar cover to make a spoof on it for a cookbook. 

For me what makes a book cover intriguing is if it can stand on its own two feet...or spine (ha, my attempt at a book joke).  If I was an author, I would hope that my book would be successful but would I want it to emulate the style of another book cover, just because it's popular?  I really don't think I would like that and would be really disappointed.   I get annoyed when I see that because it's grouping books together to make sales.

On the flip side, sometimes a cover is not my taste at all but the reviews win me over.  I love The Great Gatsby but I really don't like the cover art.  It's a classic and it's an easily recognizable cover and because of my love for the book- I like the cover art. Hopefully that made an ounce of sense.

I'm thinking of putting together a few "flipped covers" and hopefully I can share those this week.

Be sure to link-up with Nicole and have a great Sunday!