“Don’t judge a book by its cover”. A solid piece of advice in my opinion. Yet, we’ve all done just the opposite at least once. Don’t try to deny it, we’re all guilty, we’ve all judged a book by its cover and, honestly, it’s kind of what we’re expected to do. The book cover is designed to get your attention, to make you notice the book. The cover is the first impression and it’s main purpose is to be attractive and interesting enough that it makes you wanna see what the book is about.
For me, a good cover serves the book in two ways: it makes the book stand out and creates enough interest to attract a potential reader and it adds to the enjoyment of the story. This second thing is tricky and very subjective, but if a book cover shows me something about the story that somehow contributes to it, whether it’s a setting, a character, an important element, then I enjoy the book even more. Maybe I’m weird, but I’ll show you what I mean.
This is, again in my opinion, a really good book cover. The book is called “The Last Passenger” in English. As you can tell from the title and the cover, the story takes place in a ship. For me the cover does a great job with adding to the enjoyment of the story because it shows the setting where it takes place, which already gives the reader a sense of the kind of book they’re gonna get. Something happens on that ship that it’s gonna keep you guessing. It’s a mystery, maybe with some elements of horror too. You can tell these things just by looking at the cover.
Of course, a cover can serve the purpose of showing what the book tells or it can, in some cases, just be about looking pretty and interesting to enough to sell it. The cover is a book’s presentantion card after all and ultimately the goal is to get people to buy and read the book. With this in mind, I went through my list of books on goodreads and I picked my ten favourite book covers. I considered all books, those I read and those I haven’t yet. I was surprised to discover that some of my favourite covers for books that I already read belong to those I wouldn’t necessarily call my favourite stories, but this is not about the stories, I’ll talk about that on a future post.
For now, here are my ten favourite book covers. If one or more of them catch your eye, you can click on them to go to each book’s page on Goodreads and learn more about it.
What do you think? What are your favourite book covers?
You must be logged in to post a comment.