Behold, the Book Blob
Nothing new here: The publishing industry likes the “blob.” My own personal addition/extrapolation about this cover trend is that these book covers give readers/buyers the comforting sense that they are somehow with-it and cool. (Because I will admit that I’ve had the opposite experience, wherein I was reading a book with a very weird and quaint book cover — I can’t remember what it was — and I wondered what image that was projecting.) But whatever!
Anyway, PRINT just ran a quick read about this cover trend, wherein the author notes that “this ‘safe’ route [is] disproportionately taken in service of women of color and debut authors in particular” because “Amazon’s user-data analysis can’t easily group novelists by whose prose is deftly funny or sweeping and profound, who’s earnest and who’s cynical, or who experiments with form in which way nearly as well as it can group by demographic categories.” Yup. I get it, that’s life: People want to categorize in any way we can. It’s still annoying.
But I loved the last bit about being a “sucker for that breathless feeling of seeing a cover on the shelf that looks like nothing I’ve seen before.”💯 Book covers are important not just for marketing purposes, but also for imbuing a “feeling” to readers. Guess you are either a “I’ll like whatever everyone else is liking” kinda person…or not.
originally published on instagram