Judging a Book by its Cover

My free spirit has spent a considerable amount of time lately, pondering whether I shouldn't, or can't judge a book by its cover. The latter, obviously, was easily eliminated--judging books by covers is a favorite pastime of our society these days. We even invent covers so that we can make snap-evaluations even more easily.

This leaves me with the inevitable conclusion that I shouldn't judge a book by its cover--to which my rational responds, "What are they trying to say, that books and covers don't match? Are they not one and the same, part of a whole?" This anecdote may have applied sometime near the turn of the previous millennium, when the average writer´s creative artistic ability was limited to a chunk of charcoal and a piece of wood, before the creation of modern auxiliary tools such as digital software, Photoshop, illustrators, and mass media--or in short, before everything that makes life worth living.

"Why this imprisonment?" free-minded writers cry in agony. "Why so much anguish???"  Their plight is, of course, understandable. After all, things have changed a lot in the last hundred years. Writing has become faster-paced, more sophisticated, and more intricate. Our ability to design covers using digital technology has shot through the roof and aided in enhancing a book's aesthetic ability to reach out and capture a reader's interest as well as to represent the books content more accurately.

I'm of course not saying that a book's cover makes all the difference, nor that it always represents a book all of that time.  Were that true, Twilight really would be the best book ever written. What I am saying, is that there is a connection between a book and its cover, and with any GOOD book, we should be able to judge, or feel, until a certain degree, the quality of the book. As with any product, our criticism can come from several different points of examination, with drastically different weight placed upon each one.

In a more pertinent example, I could explain this connection as a sea without fish, or a chicklet without feathers, a canvas without paint, peanut butter without jelly, or even a book without a cover.  While these examples are all well and good, they fail to attain the owed level of gravity. We could get by easily for a matter of days, were all the fish removed from the sea.  More difficult, but still possible, would be life without peanut butter and jelly.  Furthermore, authors generally aren´t that great at cooking anyway, so to them, this entire matter is trite. 

However, even to the most twistedly devout and eccentric, elements of a finely tuned book have a core based much deeper than cooking or wildlife conservation. In its purest form, we are almost talking about religion. So let us now examine, if you will, the spirit and the body of a book, which, when combined, form its soul.

Now we've grasped the proper connection between a book and it´s cover, with a superbly chosen example. NOTE: This example is flawless unless we apply it to real humans, as their outer covers generally have nothing to do with their inner content.

Enough of the theory.  Now down to the practical--methods of evaluation.

1) Size of author name--an easy way to judge the author's fan base. A small author name means "unknown." Medium-sized to the size of the book title's font means he is possibly very popular and established. And finally, author's name that dwarfs the book's title...well, obviously means he's unknown, unprofessional, and unsavvy.

2) Cover-art styles, such as realistic or fantasy styles. Fantasy art can indicate that the author's focus is on capturing imagination. On the other hand, books with realistic cover art and life-like descriptions of its characters generally tend to be more logically conceived, and thoroughly written (meaning they're much longer.)

3) Does the cover seem to pertain directly to the books content, or is it just a catchy abstract creation? Books that receive enough attention to get signature art for their cover are more likely to have received attention in the other important areas of publication, such as editing, revising, publicizing, etc.

4) Does the cover reach out and grab you? Does it have a seemly order to its intricate details that captures your imagination and indicates a masterful touch of a top-selling artist/graphic designer/marketing specialist? If it does, don't pay any attention to it.  It's probably just you. No one can make a cover that grabs everyone.  And besides, a lot of the time an at-first pointless cover may develop deeper meaning as you read along, the sign of a truly inspired book. You'll never know until you read it. Think of all the amazing books you could be missing because you don't know enough about the book at the start to appreciate its exquisiteness!

But above all, don't worry and don't stress yourself.  This whole "reading the cover" thing is largely subjective anyway. So just go out, find something interesting, and read it.

You get what I'm trying to say.