Why Are Book Covers So (fill in the blank) These Days?

The Fashion(ing) of Covers for Books and Albums.

The question was asked in a writer’s forum:

So what's the deal with mainstream book covers today and why are they so lame?

Just my VERY humble opinion from watching the cycles over time.

Book covers/album covers, like fashion, go in cycles. The baroque over the top, the crazy abstract stuff, the modern art "white square with red box", photographs, cartoonish, photo-bashed, watercolor, clipart, etc. So, trends change, and trends cycle.

Digital methods, whether hand drawn, rendered, multimedia or generated are faster than painted - (oil, acrylic, colored pencil, charcoal, water color, pen and ink or even the old photography from developed film), which means more art for the artist to do, which is important, as there are more books than ever being published, which drives the price down, which means you need to do more work to get the same pay. So positive and negative.

The next piece of the puzzle is that Digital and it's off shoots, tend to make everyone with a piece of software or a subscription think that they can make art. I'm not saying that anyone can't draw, or paint, or photo-bash, but that doesn't mean that they are making pleasing art. And I'm not saying that you have to have an art degree, either, but an understanding of art principles is important. And while you can throw spaghetti at the wall, and get lucky and get a Van Gogh knockoff every once in a while, you may not know WHY that image went viral. And that isn't counting that Book/Album covers are closer to Ad marketing than they are to Art, at this point in time. So having some education both about art and about marketing will help tremendously. Know the genre and reader expectations which sadly are shaped by the big guys and their Ivy Leagued art directors. And everyone else follows, just like in fashion.

But, there is the "next big thing", which is like Bell bottom jeans, everyone is surprised, everyone wants them, until they don't. So people/companies are trying to strike that gold, just as writers are trying to find the story that goes viral, while still trying to write to market and follow what that other unicorn author did.

So, the next piece of the puzzle is practice to build skill and an eye. If you are just doing gAI as your first stab at art, yeah it makes pretty Rorschachs, that pleases people's Pareidolia, but without a prior knowledge of traditional art techniques and psychology, you just aren't going to get something that doesn't equate to "lame", except for that aforementioned Spaghetti Van Gogh. gAI is starting to suffer from "AI poisoning" every piece of art is starting to look like every other piece of art, because people are filling AI models with more AI pictures, and the models are also scraping more AI images from the web, so it continues to build on faulty data, and is becoming homogenous. It takes an artistic eye as well as ingrained principles of art to take the Rorschach and post work it to become good art. So find someone who has worked with other mediums before.

Fontology is super important as is color theory in good advertising and good covers, as we've established that covers are advertising. A beautiful piece of art advertises the skill of the artist. A cover should advertise the skill of the author - odd but true.

And again, it comes full circle - money. Everyone wants to pay less - for the book as a reader, for the art and the manuscript as a publisher, for the paper and pens for the writer, and for the paint and canvas for the artist. When you are on a race to the bottom, quality is going to suffer in general, which does make those other gems really stand out. Like for me, pouring hundreds if not thousands of dollars into supplies, hundreds of hours of practice and tens to hundreds of hours of education in my cover art game, I will never make that back, because cover art is now mostly a minimum wage job, just like writing is.

And do I blame authors/publishers for not wanting to pay more for their covers when for pennies and some time they can do gAI? Or outsource to a foreign group, who also uses gAI and/or cheap photo-bashing techniques and copies other cover for less that $40 dollars, because they can live on that? No, I don't. I got into doing covers for 2 reasons - 1. I loved Vallejo covers and Whelan and the others, and I wanted to do that, too! And I started writing my own stories and saw how expensive that was going to be to get covers, so, I took the training and knowledge I already had and started building on it to do my own covers. So, no, I don't blame them. But, I'm only going to do so much "exposure/pity/pro bono" work, too, because, I do have a life to live, as well.

It's sad but true.