Dear...
Saturday, July 07, 2012I've wanted to start this feature for a while now. I have always wished to write letters to random people or even specific people. It seems like a cool idea: writing a letter in a slim chance that the specific person will read it. This feature should be a fun series of posts that bring about discussions in the comments. Today, I wrote a letter about something that bothers me in the book industry.
Dear Authors Who Have Their Faces Enlarged On The Back
Covers Of Their Work (No Offense, James Patterson),
There is not much that turns me off about a book. I’ll read almost everything, but mostly YA is
the genre I prefer. Why? I don’t know why I like YA so much. Maybe because the YA genre sounds so much
more interesting than the adult genre.
Maybe it is because I am on the edge of the YA age group (even though YA
is read by mostly all ages, especially 12 and up). YA rocks.
Maybe I like YA more because the book covers are not nearly as boring or
obnoxious.
Really, do you have to have a picture of your face on your
book? When I want to look for a summary
of the book, I look at the back cover. I
don’t like to see a big huge face staring at me. It is scary, especially if you have an author
picture that looks like a mug shot.
So be more like YA and have your picture in a small icon on
the back flap or don’t have your picture at all. I think it would increase your sales a huge
deal. Yes, I know you may be famous
(yes, Stephen King and James Patterson), but most of your readers can do
without seeing a huge picture of your face on the back cover of the book. I mean, what are the odds that we would
recognize you anyway? Now we can, which
is one of the advantages to having this done to your books.
Just please take my advice, don’t do this. Don’t put your face on the back cover. I might even buy your book then… if what it
says on the back cover (because that is where the summary usually goes if one
does not have a huge picture of themselves) sounds interesting to me. I’m just saying (and I didn’t mean to offend
anyone in the making of this letter).
Sincerely,
Gina
Does this bother you, as well? What do you think about those pictures on the back of book covers?
4 comments
It doesn't bother me, but I don't see it a whole lot. Plus this might not be an authors decision, but a publishers. It is very rare an author gets to pick what goes directly on their cover other than a blurb they write.
ReplyDeleteBeth ^_^
http://sweetbooksnstuff.blogspot.com/
I agree about authors having a HUGE picture of themselves on the back of their books! I was never a fan of that sort of thing. Major turn off for a reader, like myself :)
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of writing letters to strangers. In fact, I have a friend who actually wrote over 200 love letters with her typewriter and left them in random public places for strangers to read and keep.
This doesn't really bother me but I always thought it was kind of odd. Wspecially on library books where you can't take the cover off. I remember this happening with a few Stephen King novels.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of this feature. :D Authors whose pictures are on the back cover doesn't bother me TOO much, though what I do dislike is when it's ALL picture and the summary is on the inside. Blech.
ReplyDelete