Judging books by their covers

I found a site of dubious legality with a wide selection of independently published books and was delighted by the cover images. Scrolling through the list I found some I wanted to share and I noticed some trends.

The collection (which is probably a representative sample of all books published in America) are broken into these categories:

• 60% romance novels
• 20% murder mysteries
• 8% science fiction/fantasy
• 5% pro-military/prepper
• 5% general drama
• ~2% other including non-fiction

In the bland book categories are ones where the person just stuck a picture they took that one time they visited the beach. These books are a mystery - no-one knows what they contain.

This author didn't have a generic vacation landscape photo but instead used some clipart and a picture of a motorcycle. I saw another of his books - it had different clipart and another motor vehicle.

Then there's science fiction. These are usually of a militaristic bent but they often have fantasy elements.

These can have the most entertainingly bad cover art.

I can't imagine that she's holding anything other than a green baguette. The artist must have just used a baguette as reference image right? What is that?

Of course there's there are books trying to capitalize on the young adult hunger games fans.

Amanda was pleased to see there were authors out there catering to her interests.

Murder mysteries were the second most common books I saw in the collection. Usually the covers were too boring or cutesy to reproduce here. Murder mystery covers usually show an end table with a rose and cup of coffee, a gun or a knife, or a cartoon of a woman holding a magnifying glass. A large percentage just have kittens or puppies and have puns in the title. Again they were too boring to reproduce here but here's a representative sample of some book titles.

Then there are the romance novels. These are generally broken into two types with about 60% being period dramas (think pride and prejudice) and bland hallmark specials and 40% showing a man with his pectoral muscles.

I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of women who only buy and read books with pecs on the cover. Within these pectoral romances 99% feature one of the following:

• wolves
• aliens
• bears
• cowboys
• bikers
• billionaires (never millionaires)
• clansmen
• vampires
• soldiers
• football players

Look out lady it's coming right at you!

Alpha Dragon's Nanny from the Billionaire Shifters' Nanny Mates Series.

Finally there are the strange books. I found a disturbing amount of bigfoot erotica and drama. I'm not sure if this fits under science fiction/fantasy.

Books with very specific fetishes.

And books with very specific grievances.

I don't know if the author was so excited about this idea he had to spell it out on the front cover or if whoever he contracted to do the cover art took his suggestions too literally. That's a portrait of the author right?.

MM MPREG is code for a romantic male-male relationship with male-pregnancy. That they have to specify this is nonshifter fiction tells me more than I want to know. How does MPREG work physiologically? Which hole does the baby come out of?!

You can tell this horse is so fed up with their shit.

Then there's this one. Actually I think I would read this book.

I've only scratched the surface of wacky book covers in this collection so you can expect to see more of these in the future.

posted by na on June 16, 2021 18:33