Judging Books By Their Covers

I have to apologize to Kit Tunstall for making fun of her name…it was a cheap shot (I gambled that there was a 50/50 chance that  it wasn’t a pen-name and I lost). Her comment about all the money in e-book erotica made me curious about her…so I checked out her site. There may be, as she claims, a oodles of cash in the smutty e-book biz, but obviously none of the profits are going towards cover art. It turns out that the cover of her e-book PHANTASIE, so brilliantly lampooned by the Smart Bitches Who Love Trash Novels, is not half-as-bad as some of her others…
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9 thoughts on “Judging Books By Their Covers”

  1. You’re right. The people on Lee’s book look too life-like…and the guy’s gun is in his hand instead of his pants.
    How can you even compare Lee’s bookcover to those Ellora’s Cave embarrassments is beyond me. That guy with the boa constrictor in his shorts is hilarious…so is the lady with the weird arms that bend in strange ways…but she’s better off than the lady on the bed who apparently broke her neck whipping her head around to look at the man-thing who walked into her room.

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  2. How can you even compare Lee’s bookcover to those Ellora’s Cave embarrassments is beyond me
    It may well be beyond you, but it is pretty clear to me. The female figures in both are fairly ridiculous (try to mentally fill in the gap between the woman’s forearm and hand in Goldberg’s cover); the image exists in some bizarre null-space that serves to make the male character look less realistic (as opposed to being the most realistic part of the image, clearly the goal); and the font and border choices are positively archaic, the sort of thing you might see in a low-rent SF paperback from Germany in the 1970s. Nor does the image work, at all, with the title. At least the Sims Porno Edition(tm) characters on the smut titles tell the reader one important thing: there’s lots of heterosexual fucking in these books.
    Five Star certainly designs better covers than Ellora’s Cave, but the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Both publishers seem fairly well-committed to the “shit ’em out and slap ’em on” school of cover design. There may be plenty of money to be made in the library market, but the Gale Group didn’t spend any of that dosh on Lee’s cover.

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  3. Eh. Lousy covers are ubiquitous. It’s sort of fun to see the publishers’ expectation of their audience. Publishers routinely mistake me for a teenaged boy.

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