Judging a book by its cover?

[Michael]

I found this article very interesting. Apparently a 'serious literary' author finds success in publishing sales occurs for her - only when the book gets an unserious pink cover...

According to the article, Drabble is suffering because her publisher finds it hard to categorise her writing. "I write literary novels, but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre ... whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary," she is reported to have said.

Source-Article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/oct/09/publishing-cover-margaret-drabble)

One of the 'gems' in the article is this statement...

"Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them,"

So many issues here - first of all the 'book and its cover' thing, or the whole commercial mass-market-distribution issue of conformity, or the dominance of females as buyers of books, and finally the idea that big business just doesn't know how to market books to women. :ummm:

Any women book buyers around here like to offer an opinion on this topic? I find it rather interesting.

[bug]

I see the problem. I remember when a book called A Million Little Pieces came out. It was already destined for the best seller list because Oprah breathed the word and her minions will fall over themselves to buy any product she mentions in passing, but all that and proceeding scandal over the book aside, I really wanted to get the book. Know why? 'Cause there were sprinkles on the cover. It was a bright blue cover with a picture of a hand coated in candy sprinkles, and I'm like "Lord, how could this NOT be the best book ever written?" But I refuse to be a victim, and my attraction to the book because I loved the cover was the source my vow never to read it. Take that, marketing gurus. Besides this colorful abomination, I find that the literary world's obvious attempt to appeal to women repulsive and patronizing. If a book is pink, I dont pick it up. If it has a picture of a cartoon red and purple high heel or a sunhat with a flower on it, I burn it on my porch. If it has a title like "Lipstick Diaries" on it, I take a sharpie and draw a Hitler mustache on the cute long-eyelashed characture on the front. I feel insulted most times I go into a bookstore and see these things aimed towards me, but I understand. It works, and if you want to be an author (and get paid) you do something that works. Reading is entertainment, and in order to appeal to the retarded masses, you dumb down everything until it becomes entertaining. And to be honest, there isn't exactly a long list of fantastic women authors over the course of history. From my observations, women (generalization) do not write as well as men....AND, when they do write as well as men, they don't get read by women, but men. Ooo, that was garble....here, I'll put it this way. When Lousia May Allcott wrote Little Women, women hated her. This happened to Kate Chopin with The Awakening, too. They wanted some cute little story about a pretty young lady who finds a handsome man and we all sigh and flutter our fans and feel good, like the rest of the pre-harlequin romance genre of books provoked. When someone didn't follow protocol, rejection happened. The reason these books survived as classic literature and are admired for being ahead of their time is because of men, not women. Women were busy with the Christian Temperance movement and smashing liquor bottles. Like I said, this is a generalization. But I think it rings true today, in women's books, except now it's more acceptable to be slutty. You've come a long way, baby. Trite and innoccent to trite and riddled with crabs.

[Dominick]

With a few exceptions I couldn't care less what's on the cover of a book. I usually buy the cheapest -complete, unabridged- edition available. Funnily enough those are often Penguin or Wordsworth Classics and those mostly have very nice covers.
I wasn't even aware there's such a thing as "women's books". :shrug:

[Helene]

From my observations, women (generalization) do not write as well as men....AND, when they do write as well as men, they don't get read by women, but men. Ooo, that was garble....here, I'll put it this way. When Lousia May Allcott wrote Little Women, women hated her. This happened to Kate Chopin with The Awakening, too. They wanted some cute little story about a pretty young lady who finds a handsome man and we all sigh and flutter our fans and feel good, like the rest of the pre-harlequin romance genre of books provoked. When someone didn't follow protocol, rejection happened. The reason these books survived as classic literature and are admired for being ahead of their time is because of men, not women.

I hardly think it's fair to judge uneducated women on their literary tastes. And considering the fact that most women had virtually no education whatsoever, that means you can hardly judge any of them.

Besides, what you write about the reception of Little Women is simply untrue. Louisa May Alcott was considered irrelevant by men, as what she wrote about was the domestic sphere. Her readership was completely female. The only time you can claim that women rejected it was in the 1960s-70s, when women were too busy rejecting the male-female dichotomy to pay attention what the book was actually saying. It wasn't admired for being ahead of its time until the 1980s, when women re-evaluated their initial feminist rejection.

[Sucre]

From my observations, women (generalization) do not write as well as men....AND, when they do write as well as men, they don't get read by women, but men. Ooo, that was garble....here, I'll put it this way. When Lousia May Allcott wrote Little Women, women hated her. This happened to Kate Chopin with The Awakening, too. They wanted some cute little story about a pretty young lady who finds a handsome man and we all sigh and flutter our fans and feel good, like the rest of the pre-harlequin romance genre of books provoked. .
You are saying two things here :
1) That women do not write as well as men (this of course can only be a generalization)
2) That women do not read as well as men

I would intuitively think that there is a correlation between the two and considering that the level of education of women is usually, until a recent time and not anymore in our modern western countries only, less than of men not very surprising indeed. All a matter of education you see.

"They wanted some cute little story about a pretty young lady who finds a handsome man." Sure, that's called "women pornography", Love with feelings. Men will want some nice magazines showing big pictures of naked women with big tits, Love without feelings. Any better ? Serious literature is something else and has belong to the realm of Men for a long long time and still today.

[Sucre]

The cover is definitely very important to me. This is why I favour such publishers as Actes Sud - I just love the feel of the cover and the sobriety of the illustration - besides it's a great publisher who "discovered" a great deal of authors. I like paperback better than hard cover and would wait for a hard cover to become a paperback.

By the way I hate most English editions for that very reason that the cover (like the one in the article) is very tacky. I say I buy the book IN SPITE of the cover.

[andrewl]

I found this article very interesting. Apparently a 'serious literary' author finds success in publishing sales occurs for her - only when the book gets an unserious pink cover...



Source-Article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/oct/09/publishing-cover-margaret-drabble)

One of the 'gems' in the article is this statement...



So many issues here - first of all the 'book and its cover' thing, or the whole commercial mass-market-distribution issue of conformity, or the dominance of females as buyers of books, and finally the idea that big business just doesn't know how to market books to women. :ummm:

Any women book buyers around here like to offer an opinion on this topic? I find it rather interesting.

A few years ago i started using the library rather than purchasing books. I don't even know what the cover looks like most of the time until i actually pick it up at the library.

Andrew

[Michael]

Here's another article addressed to the issue of 'judging a book by its cover'.

Apparently the ideas expressed by bug are not that uncommon.

Source (http://www.good.is/?p=13823)

Personally, I'm with andrewl above - I couldn't care less about book covers. Plain solid black face with just the title and author name is sufficient for me (and I'm definitely a big buyer of books, but I don't even look at the fiction section or bother reading any book reviews on fiction).

I'll certainly admit that if the cover of a book is too busy looking, I'll avoid it like the plague, thinking that anything that is styled to appeal to teenaged girls (like People magazine for example), is not something I'm going to be interested in.

[Sucre]

It's quite obvious : jugement, any jugement, occurs with all five senses.

[Donkey]

Here is a book that one could easily and accurately judge by its cover. :mad:


http://www.byubookstore.com/webitemimages/439/0-316-01584-9-t.jpg

[Michael]

Here is a book that one could easily and accurately judge by its cover. :mad:
That cover might perhaps explain some of the enormous popularity of that book with teenage girls! :D