Judge A Book By It’s Cover

Posted Posted by trav in Book Covers, Book Talk, On the Web     Comments 1 comment
Oct
22

Here’s a neat little time killer. JudgeBy.com displays cover images from Amazon and you have to guess what their 5-star rating is. I played for 20 covers and never got one right. I think it’d be more fun to play with just fiction covers or some sub-set, because once you get to a cover like

Words Their Way

You really just can’t tell if all of the home schooling folks’ reviews were good or bad about this book. In reality, there isn’t much of a relation between “best-seller” and “good cover design”. You just have to look at the Best Sellers Lists in all the papers to see that, which is a shame. But this is a fun little time water built on the Amazon API though. Can you pick a best-seller simply by looking at the cover?

  • http://www.tianodesign.com/blog Stephen Tiano

    As a book designer, my take on covers (back/front cover combo) is that, ideally, they attract prospective readers and get them to take a look inside. Once inside, the interior layout must be transparent, leading the reader along from beginning to end in a way that’s easy on the reader’s eyes. It’s important to not have such a wonderfully inventive interior design that the reader is distracted. But for all of that, it’s still the author, the writing, that gives the book its value.