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
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?
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.