The joy of covers

By Brian Clegg

Authors have mixed relationships with book covers. Some publishers give us full right of veto on what a cover looks like, others simply show us what it’s going to be. Some covers are great – others are, frankly, dull. There have been covers I treasure (for example, when I was still writing business books, the Spanish translation of my book Capturing Customers Hearts took the title literally, featuring a scarred chest with the heart removed), while others I’d rather ignore.

It is also possible to be misled by the appearance of covers on well-known online bookshops. I’ve recently had published a book called Navigating Artificial Intelligence – a highly-illustrated overview

book that gives you (I hope) a good introduction to the topic and its significance: and let’s face it, there isn’t much that is as significant as AI at the moment. To go along with some fun illustrations inside (who wouldn’t want to see a dog dressed as Henry VIII?), the cover is impressively striking, if perhaps a little busy. It’s not entirely clear from the selfie above, but the cover features the kind of fluorescent orange that makes you reach for the sunglasses.

But take a look at the book on Amazon (left) and, while it’s still eye-popping it’s now a deep pink (the little known Deep Purple/Pink Floyd crossover cover band). Then pop over to Bookshop.org (right) and there’s yet another version, this time also pink but with different colours elsewhere, including a brain that pretty much obscures the title. 

I suspect what tends to happen is that publishers set up listings in online bookshops before the final cover has been printed and forget to make changes. Incidentally, there’s also distinctly dodgy content in the Amazon listing which says ‘Review’ and then has a quote from Alain de Botton: ‘He still manages to surprise me with something new on every page’. While this is indeed something de Botton said in a review of one of my books, it was Inflight Science, not this one.

They say ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ – but sometimes it’s hard not to. Personally, though, if it’s an author I like, I pretty much ignore the cover… which in some cases it’s just as well.

You can get Navigating Artificial Intelligence from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.