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Judging books by their covers

The proverb about not judging books by their covers is put to the lie time and again in stores, where the poor old covers have only a few seconds to grab the potential reader’s eye. Many authors are keenly aware of that, which leads them to micromanage the designs for their books.

The blogosphere has produced two good examples of authorial interest in covers lately. Shameless magazine‘s Stacey May Fowles is publishing her novel Be Good with Tightrope Books this fall, and she’s asking Shameless blog readers to vote on her two cover choices here. (Quillblog joins the current majority of comments in voting for the clean, spare, and stunning version one, hopefully an easy winner over the cluttered second option.)

In the not-clean-and-spare department, Managing Humans author Michael Lopp blogs here about his own cover design experience. When the first proposals showed up, he, uh, wasn’t thrilled.

Right. So, the book. 10 months of constant pessimism [about his book]. This is why when the first batch of covers for the book showed up, I thought, “Okay, good. I knew they’d be awful.”

Worst Case Scenario

Here. Play along at home.

Not complete disasters, but clearly cliché. I mean, c’mon — cheese? Didn’t we move our cheese around back in 1998?

So Lopp asked a friend, artist Kevin Cornell, to come up with artwork for a new cover. The final product, which the author loved, is a little fussy for Quillblog’s taste – but you, dear reader, can judge the cover (and the book) for yourself.

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