Why I Will Never Use a Book Cover Designer
That said, I will never use a book cover designer—a middleman and mercenary—for these additional reasons:
- Book cover designers, having little to no knowledge of the books they are assigned, rely on clichés and stereotypes to create cover images that misrepresent their stories and mislead their readers. By contrast, authors’ book covers are acts of honesty, promising only what their carefully considered and crafted words can deliver.
- Book cover designers’ depictions, right or wrong, rob readers of the opportunity to imagine characters, settings, and scenes for themselves based on books’ texts—or, in the absence of textual descriptions, their own preferences.
- Words are physically beautiful in and of themselves. Their typography—the combination of their typeface, font weight and size, posture (i.e., roman or italic), and color—can be just as impactful as—and more meaningful than—book cover designers’ images.
- Ultimately, a book cover designer’s job is to make a book look familiar (i.e., like other books). However, an author’s raison d’etre is to make their book feel singular. If a book’s title, blurb, and text, as very deliberately composed by the author, cannot accurately impart its story’s originality, nothing else can. And if a book’s title, blurb, and text, as very deliberately composed by the author, cannot make a favorable impression on prospective readers, nothing else should.
So, rather than initially judge a book by a designer’s cover, reject their biased, hackneyed, and trendy patronizingly salable cover image and remember to find pleasure in a book’s prose rather than its packaging.
"Dracula/Harker: A Gay Gothic Romance Inspired by Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'" by Mark Zidzik 