Christiane - Cover Cafe Committee Member

Reading is like breathing: it is a must. But to tell you the truth, covers have not made a great impact on my book purchases. Au contraire, it has been the authors that grab me. How remiss of me.

In the early 90’s, I had the pleasure to meet with an author and our conversation turned to cover art. She was disappointed with the people designing her cover. Her main characters were on the cover, but a key factor was completely ignored. The male character's hair turned silver at an early age but the cover portrayed him with jet black hair. This was my first experience discussing the cover design process and how little input the authors have.

I continued to ignore covers because no matter what the genre, the covers were not pleasing or interesting. However, things started to change after that conversation. I was a member of a book readers list and two of the readers were members of the Cover Cafe Committee. We started talking about covers and how the clients, at the bookstore where I worked, reacted to the book covers. The reactions were either funny or disgusted but some were very insightful. The insightful reactions made me look at the covers from a different viewpoint.

I received an invitation to join this committee and now I look at book covers differently. I have a tendency to pick on the little flaws more than the total look of the cover. What I notice first is the length of a leg, a finger positioned at almost a right angle from the other fingers, or a house perched on the side of a mountain, making me wonder how it stays there. But my pet peeve, is a cover with a missing head or even part of the head missing. This will put the cover in the automatic dismissal column. It might seem harsh but a "missing head" cover is a complete turnoff for me.

Below is a link to one of the most famous cover bloopers:

Christina Dodd's Castles In The Air or Three Arms is one too many!

I still have the original book.