Friday, March 9, 2012

Follow Friday - The Aliens Say They Are Hiding Conspiracy Theorists in Area Fifty-One. Or Was It the Other Way Around?


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Hesperia Loves Books and Novel Days.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Have you ever looked at book’s cover and thought, This is going to horrible? But, was instead pleasantly surprised? Show us the cover and tell us about the book.

Book cover questions are always difficult for me to answer because I usually don't pay much attention to book covers. For me, the book cover is mostly just something that gets flipped past on the way to the story. Sometimes a good cover will make an impression on me, but in the science fiction and fantasy genre there are so many cringeworthy covers that another one rarely makes an impression. I also know that most published authors have almost no say in the design of the covers that go on their books, and the art may be done by someone with only the most passing familiarity with the contents of what they are illustrating, so a bad cover isn't really the author's fault much of the time.

But just to pick something out of the hat (and something that has bothered me), I will say that the covers of Catherine Asaro's books that feature people always look odd to me. It is only the books that feature people as a prominent part of the artwork, and they just look wrong to me somehow:


The odd thing about this is when the covers of her books don't feature people, they look pretty good. As examples, here are three books from her Skolian Saga series:


I don't want to be seen as picking on Asaro's books: I loved them all. And the books of hers that I singled out are by no means the only science fiction books that have odd looking artwork on the covers. But I had to pick something, and these were the most memorable books with art that I thought was substandard.


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4 comments:

  1. This is really interesting. I just happened to talk about covers because they are on my mind right now. But the topic seems to be all over the internet.

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  2. @Julia Rachel Barrett: That is a weird coincidence. When I read your post on your blog it seemed to me like you were coming at it from a different angle though.

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  3. I definitely pay attention to cover art but know not to judge the interior of the book by the cover because the author almost always has no say in the cover design but that doesn't stop me from paying attention to a cover. I completely understand what you mean about scifi book covers however, they aren't well...I tend to not like almost all of the ones I have seen from the genre but you have to admit when you see a scifi book cover you almost always know it's a scifi book.

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  4. @Sandy: There are many science fiction book covers that I really like, but there are lots and lots of them that are really awful.

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