New Site Mocks Bad Artwork On Ebook Covers

An anonymous reader writes A British newspaper is celebrating "the world's worst ebook artwork", as discovered by the creator of a new Tumblr feed. 'It's the hubris of it that people get a kick out of — the devil-may-care attitude of an author who, with zero arts training, says to themselves: "How hard can it be?" Two different authors simply cut-and-pasted smaller images over a background showing the planets, according to one Kindle blog, which notes that one author actually pasted eyes and lips onto the planets, creating an inadvertently creepy montage. But the site's creator tells the newspaper that it's ultimately meant to be an affectionate tribute to their rejection of the mundane and appreciating each creative and beautiful mess.

Comments

Re:Novelty Effect

[radtea]

Cover design is hard, and most people do judge books by the cover. These books have content that is likely reflected by their covers pretty well, so in that sense I'd say most of them are pretty good.

The one a few pages in about the guy who's annoyed is really quite good: blunt, angry, simple. Since that's what the book looks to be like, how can the cover be bad?

For my book (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1400044028&sr=1-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem) one of my first readers was an artist, so I hired her to do the cover art. It captures a lot of things about the book, and it's beautiful on its own, so it's a win.

But I'm sure a purist would find a million things wrong with it, from the ambiguities of the image to my choice of font (not papyrus or comic sans, but any font can be mocked if you work at it hard enough) to the choice of colours (too blue, not enough contrast) to the overall look (too cluttered, too busy)... and so on.

Still, my hope was to keep it reasonably low on the mockability scale, and while it's fun to mock stuff, but I have a depressing feeling that many of these mocked books are selling a lot better than a lot of less-mockable stuff. So maybe I should replace my cover with unicorns and rainbows and leather-clad half-dressed bikers to see if that boosts sales...