I love book covers. I love the eye catching pictures, I love the way they hint at the amazing story inside, and they’re definitely one of the first things that gets me to actually pick a book up and give it a look. I’m a simple bookworm. I see a cover I like, I’m going to pick it up. I wrote a little while back about the three cover styles that I love the most. There are just so many beautiful and unique covers out there and it makes my bookish heart so happy. But, as with everything, there are certain trends with covers that come up over and over again. Today I want to talk about some of the cover trends that we’ve seen maybe a little too often. This is certainly not a judgement on the individual covers. Many of them are simply gorgeous in their own rights. They just have the unfortunate trait of fitting into one of these maybe slightly overdone trends. These are three I’ve noticed the most often, but I bet you can add some of your to this list. Let me know what other trends you would add, down in the comments!
Crowns
Covers with crowns usually tick a lot of boxes for me. it suggests that there’s going to be an epic power struggle. The book is probably a fantasy. Often, the rest of the cover is pretty minimal, which is one of my favourite cover styles. And the crowns themselves are pretty and ornate and I would just like to wear one of them myself, ok? However, there is a plethora of books out there with a crown or four on the cover, to the point I’m having trouble matching the right crown to the right series. Couldn’t we let Victoria Aveyard have this trend for herself and try something a bit different every now and then?
Massive Dresses
I am always envious of heroines in books because they get all the sassy comebacks I can only dream of, they all get to go on wild, exciting adventures, and they get all the nice dresses, many of which end up on the covers of the books. There are so many examples of these covers, all those glossy skirts with a million petticoats. Thankfully fictional petticoats don’t seem to be as restricting as real life ones, because somehow these heroines manage to run and fight and not trip over their hems every three seconds. I love a good outfit of the day as much as the next person, but I’ve seen rather a lot of covers which are mostly dress, and I just feel like maybe these books are about slightly more than satins and silk? Where’s my adventure?
Half Faces
To be honest, I’ve never been the biggest fan of faces on covers in general, unless it’s original artwork that is specifically designed to depict a character, and even then I might disagree with the way they’re portrayed because obviously my brain knows what these characters look like better than the people who actually worked on the book. The solution here then is obvious. Let’s just cut everyone’s face in half. Then there’s still half a face for you to fill in with your imagination. That or all these poor characters have had a terrible accident. Either way, there are a surprising number of books that couldn’t budget a whole face into their cover design.
What other cover trends do you think are possibly overdone at this point? What is your favourite cover trend? What is your current least favourite trend? Let’s chat!
Oooh, an excellent point. I own several books that have these trends: The Bone Queen (crown) and The Remnants trilogy (half faces). If I were to add one, I’d probably put skulls up there. So many skulls, seriously: If We Were Villains, An Anatomy of Beasts, Inkdeath, etc. The one book cover I could forgive for half a face is Phantom of the Opera.