I’ve heard in another post of mine that a fair amount of fantasy fans want to see more engaging covers. I would assume this sentiment goes beyond just the fantasy genre. However, as fantasy is my main focus right now, that’s where I’m coming from for this post.
I recently saw the spray-painted editions of the Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros) books and they are quite cool. Perusing Barnes & Noble recently, I’ve seen a mix of both interesting and what you might call “dime-a-dozen” covers. For me, the cover is what gets me to pick up a book and read its blurb. If that sounds decent, then I’ll usually give it a try.
Are you like me, or is your hunt for new authors/books a bit more involved? Do you have any covers as examples that are your favorites? What stands out the most to you when looking at covers?
On a side note, I heard from a reputable source that books published traditionally typically don’t get much, if any, author input on the covers, as the publishing company uses their resources to decide what will work best to market the book. As a future potential author, that’s kind of disheartening to hear. Of course, with indie publishing you can decide your cover art. Would love to hear if anyone has any thoughts on that…
Amazon Prime has a book with a shapely woman in black leather on the cover. After scrolling past it 100 times looking for interesting titles, I pushed it to my Kindle. There it sat for a year+ with that shapely woman in black leather taunting me in the Uncollected folder. Eventually, I channeled my inner 14 year old and read it. It wasn’t awful so I read the next one in the series. The series dead-ended so I tried another series by the author but abandoned it fairly quickly.
It’s not how I normally choose books but the Kate Beckinsale Underworld outfit with more exaggerated curves sucked me in.