Read:
This week’s “read” is more of a “look”–just as we’re on the conversation of book covers, Buzzfeed released a list of 32 of the Most Beautiful Book Covers of 2014. There are some really excellent covers on here, and though the list skews toward upmarket literary fiction (where there are less conventions to adhere to than genre fiction or nonfiction), it’s still a great example of what’s working in the market now. And while it’s tempting to just say “It’s pretty. I like it.” (I do this ALL the time, heh), it’s much more helpful to try to dissect why it works. Here are my favorites and why I think they are awesome:
Gold foil is very hot right now in the online world, but this is the first book cover I’ve seen tap into the trend. It’s a bit hard to tell from this image if they used full gold foil on the entire cover or just reserved it for the author’s name (since this is an expensive production add-on), but it looks incredible. It’s eye-catching enough to stand out on a bookstore table, but it also doesn’t pigeonhole the book into too narrow of a genre. I think the cover of the hardcover edition of the work (which you can see here) looked too science-fiction-y, but you can tell by the back cover copy that this book is meant to be genre-defying. And for that, you need an ungenred, ungendered cover!
