Roughly every two months I go looking for upcoming books to review, which isn't always easy, because informative book-release lists aren't as readily available as CD or DVD release lists. So here's my clever little trick: I start with HarperCollins' "upcoming books" page which covers their various imprints, and a wide variety of genres. Then I look up those books on Amazon, and scroll down to the "customers also bought" section of the page, which usually features other as-yet-unreleased books. Then I go to the pages for those books, and find still more, working forward and backward like in some "Choose Your Own Adventure."
The problem comes with trying to figure out whether any of these books will be worth reviewing. But thanks to a general lack of imagination in the publishing industry, the cover art usually tells me what's what. Take this cover, for example:
I've never read anything by Faye Kellerman–let alone anything in the "Decker & Lazarus" series–but even if I'd never heard her name before, and even if the cover didn't have that little "Decker And Lazarus Are Back!" burst, it'd be obvious that this is a series mystery by a well-known author. The actual illustration is minimal, because the author and title–given equal weight–take up the whole cover. This image is selling a name, not a story, or even a mood.
As opposed to this:
Here's an author I actually haven't heard of, but the placement of her name, the cutesy ambiguity of the title, and–most importantly–the simple image of dessert tells me that this is probably part of a light mystery series. Maybe not what fans of the genre know as a "cozy," but at least something gentler than all those gruesome crime-solving-coroner books. (Reading the description on Amazon, it turns out I'm right. Davidson's hero is a crime-solving caterer…and part of an apparent wave of culinary detectives, judging by the titles listed under "customers also bought.")
At any rate, it's obvious that the above two authors aren't writing books like this:
Or this:
Both of these books look more serious, and likely literary. The Russo looks a little more weighty than the White–and I would guess that even if I didn't already know Russo's work–because while both covers feature moody landscapes of a kind, the Russo cover is fragmented, subtly splicing two images together and indicating that nothing under the cover will be obvious or ordinary.
Similarly, you can usually tell the difference between snapshot-of-a-moment pop histories and hefty bios by the picture on the front. The difference between this:
…and this:
…is all about the image and the text. The former establishes the subject–Eisenhower–as an icon, worth reading about in and of himself. The latter gives a sense of a moment from the same era, but the picture still needs the long title and subtitle for context. Increasingly, publishers count on titles alone to sell non-fiction titles, which is why those titles seem to be getting longer and longer, taking over the covers. That's particularly the case with quirky popular science texts like the following:
I have no idea what this book's about, but the post-modern cover (a book on top of the book!), the elliptical main title, the evocative sub-title…all these are attention-grabbers. This book is clearly about an unusual subject, handled unconventionally.
But no kind of book cover is as carefully calculated as the ones designed for what some call "chick lit." Look at this:
Leaving aside the mass-market paperback trappings, this is a kind of ultimate chick lit cover. The main elements–shoes, red coats, and pieces of men's clothing–are all there. (All that's missing is a hat, and maybe chocolate.)
The one thing you almost never see on a chick lit cover? A face. These covers are selling a notion that the story inside will be fun and relatable, about "everywoman" (or at least "everyfictionalwoman"). Not all chick lit is generic and unchallenging, but the publishers want to at least feign that they are, which means they can't alienate the reader by making the covers about anyone in particular.
(In fairness, few novels put faces on their covers, because they don't want the reader to have a fixed idea of what the characters look like. But with chick lit, the addition of certain common signifiers combined with the absence of a specific personality is particularly insidious.)
In a way, the predictability of book jacket design is useful. At a glance, potential readers can get a sense of what kind of book they might be reading. And unlike the days of dime paperbacks, when so many books had covers more lurid than their contents, today's covers reflect what's inside more often than not, even if only in an abstract way. Still, it's a little disappointing to see the publishing industry fall into such predictable patterns, branding books like soda cans.