Tyler Cowen makes the case that it may be a good idea. How convincing this case is depends, I think, on how much faith you put in the marketing people working for book publishers. It's clear that their cover designs do provide some level of effective signals -- you can identify a book as "chick lit" that's unlikely to appeal to a male 26 year-old based on the cover -- but one has to wonder on how fine-grained a level this is going to work.
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Judging a Book by Its Cover
27 Aug 2007 05:26 pm
Comments (17)
Exhibit A in Cowen's defence - Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
While there may be something to the substance of Cowen's argument, it would be a spectacularly silly sole criterion for book purchases. Surely reviews and the advice of people who know your tastes and interests are going to be far more reliable.
One obvious counterpoint is that many authors don't get much say in the choice of cover, especially for foreign publication. (An author of my acquaintance much preferred the UK publisher's choice of cover for his books.)
Now, one can argue that cover choice is designed to define the target market, and that publishers know that better than authors. But I'm less than convinced.
Cowen should know - check out the cover of his latest book, then check out the cover of Freakonomics. Notice anything? Apparently economics books won't be taken seriously unless they use a green-orange color scheme.
This link:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/08/19/books/19ontheroad_index.html
takes you to a slideshow (courtesy of the New York Times) with 25 different covers from different editions of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
You could find many more covers for older classics like the works of Shakespeare.
Undoubtedly you will find that you like some of the covers and hate others. Does that mean the quality of the book inside also varies?
I actually think people are being unfair to Cowen. First, he's defending the use of the cover, not the title, so Ginger Yellow's joke doesn't really work. As for Karl Weber's reductio ad absurdum, I don't think it really works either - Cowen makes it pretty clear that causation runs from the contents of the book, through the publisher's desire to attract buyers, to the cover. Nothing about that process means that there is only one suitable cover for each book.
That said, Cowen seems to be engaging in typical Cowen analysis, which is to say he finds an interesting idea and expresses it in an annoying, incomplete way. In particular, Cowen seems to think that his interests and the publishers' interests are somehow aligned - that they benefit by sending an accurate signal about the book's contents. That's only true if they can't do better by misrepresenting the book's contents. Say a publisher spends $10 million getting a book to market, and another publisher is able to put a very similar cover on material that cost $100,000. We all know what the second publisher will do. Which is to say, as usual in game theory, talk is cheap. The question is whether publishers are able to send a credible signal about the book's contents. The informational value of "cheap talk" is an interesting topic, one that is very much on point and one that Cowen ignores completely.
So yeah, people are being unfair to Cowen, but that doesn't mean his obnoxious blog posts deserve the outsized amount of credit they get, either.
As a tour of Cowen's head this may or may not be interesting, but it has very little to do with how covers are actually made. In practice, in many fields, covers are made to make books look like they fill predetermined slots, regardless of whether they do or not, and very often by people who don't have any real idea what's in the book.
Fantasy and science fiction writer John DeChancie coined the term FBT, or Frigging Blue Turtloid, in response to the cover for his novel Castle Kidnapped. The cover has accurate representations of half a dozen of the main characters, tied up and sitting on the back of a huge six- or eight-legged blue turtle beast which isn't in the book at all. And I know from my own experience doing art notes for game rulebooks and such that very often the artist will only ever see a sentence or paragraph describing a particular thing to be illustrated - cover artists as well as interior ones.
The rest of the cover's design is likewise often thoroughly detached from anyone in an editorial position who understands or even got the chance to read the book. The designers are usually stuck working from a category label and a few other cues, plus marketing imperatives. It would be fair to say that the cover ends up reflecting someone's vision of what the book ought to be, but I would hesitate a lot to make any stronger claim.
An old thread about the "Untitled Matt Yglesias Foreign Policy Project" produced this theoretical dust cover...
http://sens8shun.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/utbcoverlayout.jpg
Which is not meant as a preemptive judgment of Matt's forthcoming analysis.
To fill in some gaps...
Publishers' practice on cover design varies a lot. At the author-unfriendly end of the scale, it's entirely market-driven, and once an editor has approved the text, the next thing the author gets to see is complimentary copies, or the book on store shelves. The intervening decisions are made by people who may or may not have read the book, and may or may not care about it, and may or may not think text is very interesting or important anyway. At the author-friendly end, the author may be asked for input and will at least be shown the work in progress. (A good editor will, when necessary, remind the author that writing isn't the same skill as graphic design, and being excellent at one isn't a grant of wisdom for the author, of course.) In between, there's all sorts of halfway states, and lumpy handling of different stages, and like that.
So you don't know what the cover indicates until you know how it came to be. To be reasonably confident you do, you need to know general practice at the publisher, its range of variation, and ideally something about the specific people who oversaw that book's design....for all of the publishers from whom you may be buying books. I think that's quite a bit more work than, you know, just browsing the book a bit.
This seemed like a funny idea because I just saw The Seven Year Itch in which the protagonist edits a cover for Little Women so that it includes more cleavage. That reminded me of a copy of a Joseph Conrad novel with a cover of a sunburned man with a women submissively at his legs subtitled "A classic tale of adventure, betrayal and doom." I have to imagine that anyone who bought the book for its cover came away disappointed.
"I actually think people are being unfair to Cowen. First, he's defending the use of the cover, not the title, so Ginger Yellow's joke doesn't really work."
I was referring to the cover, which is just as childish as the title. And using it to support Cowen's argument.
solarjetman on Liberal Fascism:
"Judging a book by its cover is like judging a person by the color of his skin. Usually, you can’t do it. However when a person’s skin is blue, you can usually conclude that he has done something stupid involving blue paint."
Bruce Baugh's point about using the cover art to shove a book in a predetermined pigeonhole is very well taken. If you like some mysteries and not others, some SF and not others, and for that matter some chick lit and not others, the cover might not tell you too much about which is which.
Ah, okay - although I mean, have you read Goldberg's book? If not, what you're essentially saying is that you CAN judge it without reading it. Fair enough, I suppose, although since you were attacking Cowen's argument I thought it was sarcastic somehow.
Actually my last sentence isn't as true as it might be; something like Soho Press has classy designs for mysteries that are clearly designed to appeal to a different group than Janet Evanovich designs. But lots of old mysteries have ridiculously salacious covers, and chick lit covers are still pretty undifferentiated, even though there's a reasonable amount of pretty thoughtful chick lit out there that might even appeal to an open-minded 26-year-old.
Sometimes publishers have a style of cover-art that reduces all of the visual appeal of a particular title to the fact that this or that publisher has chosen to publish it.
That said, I'd like to plug (no personal gain) the work of cover-artist Tom Adams. Ballantine's Raymond Chandler reprints in the 70s with covers by Adams were the most fantastic book covers I've ever seen.
DG,
Whether you can judge Goldberg's book by the cover art is debatable. That you can judge it by the phrase appearing on the cover "by Jonah Goldberg", is not.
This is clearly true to the extent that editors want it to be true. Generic sword and sorcery should show a wizard with a sword, a dwarf, etc on the cover. Space opera - show some spaceships blasting each other. And so forth.
But often a publisher will take a different kind of book, say, a Mary Gentle or China Mieville, and slap a generic dragon or vampire cover on it, to cover up the fact that it is more ambitious or literary than the usual potboilers. Because genre potboilers sell, I guess.
Comments closed September 10, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I can't wait for the cost benefit analysis of jumping off a bridge if everyone else id doing it.
Posted by Space Monkey | August 27, 2007 5:39 PM