Are Book Covers a Dying Art?

[Steerpike]

Good story on NPR's Weekend Edition. The audio is at the site:

In The E-Book World, Are Book Covers A Dying Art? : NPR

[Wynnara]

I think book covers may be a transformed art, but hardly a dying one. The needs of a e-book cover are different than that of a print book cover but that kind of first visual impression is still very much needed regardless. Plus, every time you introduce a new technology, the old one influences it but eventually the new tech develops a visual language of its own.

It seems to me that whenever a new way of visually telling the story is invented, both the old way and the new way set off on their own paths. Like... when photography was invented, painters who had spent their whole lives trying to perfect what we would call today "photo-realistic realism" all threw up the their hands and went "gah!! you've just negated all my work with this-... this machine!!"... but then time passes and painting changes. It becomes about all the things you can't do with a camera... it becomes impressionism and abstract art... and photography wanders off and evolves as well with different lenses, light and shadow, etc. etc.

Oh and be sure to watch the TED talk that Chip Kidd did. It's pretty entertaining.

[Steerpike]

Yes. I suppose it is fair to say that the nicely detailed covers of the past are a dying art. With eBooks, where you have to rely on a thumbnail for attention, there is no need (and probably no desire) for an intricate Michael Whelan painting on your book cover. That's too bad, in a way.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

It would be nice if we had some data indicating what percentage of published books actually contain highly detailed cover art now, versus a few years ago. The article is woefully short on data, which makes this (at the moment, at least) nothing more than anecdotal.

[danr62]

Article? It reads a bit more like an ad to me.

[The Blue Lotus]

Yes. I suppose it is fair to say that the nicely detailed covers of the past are a dying art. With eBooks, where you have to rely on a thumbnail for attention, there is no need (and probably no desire) for an intricate Michael Whelan painting on your book cover. That's too bad, in a way.

For once I could not agree with you more.
Ebooks and their art or lack of it I should say will ruin the older form of book covers forever. It's a shame too just when we were finally getting good art work for sci fi and fantasy books to. Pity.

[Feo Takahari]

I treat the quality of an ebook's thumbnail as a sign of how much effort the author put in to make his or her story presentable and marketable, and I'm less likely to read an ebook with a badly-done cover. I don't think this makes me particularly unusual.

[T.Allen.Smith]

I treat the quality of an ebook's thumbnail as a sign of how much effort the author put in to make his or her story presentable and marketable, and I'm less likely to read an ebook with a badly-done cover. I don't think this makes me particularly unusual.

I agree 100% & that's one of the things self-pubbed authors skimp on a lot of the time. I look at the cover as a picture representation of the author's professionalism & effort in detail. If the cover is crap, chances are you're dealing with an amateur. That's just my opinion, but I'm quite certain the whole "don't judge a book by its cover" idea isn't what happens in reality.

[danr62]

Yes, but I think the argument being made here is that there is less room for "real" art on the thumbnail covers, so authors and publishers are opting towards more iconic imagery.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I treat the quality of an ebook's thumbnail as a sign of how much effort the author put in to make his or her story presentable and marketable, and I'm less likely to read an ebook with a badly-done cover. I don't think this makes me particularly unusual.

I think we probably underestimate how much impact the cover art makes. Good-looking cover art makes us unconsciously treat the book as professional, and vice versa. Now certainly you can get over that with a bit of concentration, but most readers aren't doing that. If person A recommends book Z to person B, and person B checks out the Amazon page, and the cover art looks amateurish, B might go, "Eh, maybe not" without even bothering to look into it. But if the cover art looks great, then B can move on to other things, like whether the description/reviews matter.