Becky's Evergreen Advice-- Please Judge a Book By Its Cover and Now LitHub Enters the Chat

I have posted about how we absolutely need to judge books by their cover MANY times (going back over 10 years). Here is the most recent time with links to older posts. Also, here is the link to every time I have tagged a post "covers."

Please explore those links because I have written about this over and over, from how covers help us judge the appeal off the story behind said cover, how they can hinder, how it helps us connect with patrons, and how to use covers as a conversation starter to display option.

When I first began writing about this, it was a little shocking, however, in the decade plus since, not only have more people started considering covers, some of the biggest literary news outlets have regular reporting on covers, their trends, and what it all means. 

Literary Hub is one such example. They have tags for book covers, cover trends, and history of book covers. [Quick aside, LitHub needs a librarian on staff; they have too many tags and they are not consistently applied in general. An entire meta data review and consolidation of tags needs to happen there. All of this should just be cataloged as "covers.]

The other day they had this excellent essay on the history of book cover trends entitled, "It’s Ok to Judge a Book By Its Cover (It’s Impossible Not To)" by Ed Simon, the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Here is the pull out quote from this excellent essay: "A history of literature could be written by analyzing book cover trends."

I want to note, he also addresses the role of covers in a digital space as well. Spoiler, they are still important.

I highly suggest everyone read it and cross reference my posts on this same topic. And remember, let the covers work for you, both to help you quickly decipher the appeal of the books you are holding (publishers paid a lot for that cover to make sure readers do this) AND to remind you that face out book displays are ALWAYS the best option, even if it mean you put fewer books on display. The covers will sell the books for you and fewer titles will circulate faster face out that more titles filling a larger display spines out. 

And finally, a note about AI covers, even if they are on books that were 100% human written. I am judging your book as slop if you slap an AI cover on it. Cover artists are creatives too. They want to be paid for their original work. You want to be paid for your written word. Thus, you slap an AI cover on your book, I am judging you as someone who I cannot trust, someone who cuts corners, someone who supports AI. Your book is slop as well.