Friday, September 10, 2010

I've found another article that everyone might find interesting. This one's about an apparently pretty strong gender bias in the publishing world when it comes to book covers.


I Write A Nasty Book. And They Want A Girly Cover On It.


Discuss!

>:D

3 comments:

Athena said...

I think this goes along with the earlier discussion we had about people who only read books written by men - maybe this article gives a bit of an explanation as to why that would occur. Even if it's an excellent, non-girly book, no guy is going to want to be seen reading something with a cover like those described in the article.

I'd be interested to see, with 80% of novel readers being women, what percentage of higher-ups in publishing houses are women. My guess: less than 50%.

Almost all of my favourite authors are men, and I don't think that that is really based on book covers (after all Terry Pratchett is my all-time favourite author, and I find all of his covers printed before the late 90s to be really upsetting), but whether or not I give a book a chance now is based almost exclusively on the cover and synopsis... and if it looks and sounds like girly crap, chances are that I won't pick it up.

Rhiannon said...

I find I'm much the same: girly cover with pastels and half-faded pics with a lot of purple and/or busty women being bent over the table by Mr. Muscles in a kilt kinda make me want to run screaming. I look for subtlety and simplicity in my book covers, something that gives me enough of an idea of what its about without giving away the plot - or lack thereof.

Really, I want to write a trashy romance novel and then disguise it as a man-book and see how many people fall for it.

Athena said...

Man book cover: A map with a compass on it, a few gold coins and a seemingly meaningless piece of rope.

Alternatively: a cityscape at night or a broken wine glass and some blood.