It’s a great cover, but the dove sort of throws things off for me.

In what way? For me it offers on off-center focus point, away from the bulls-eye of the circle of barbed wire…

What if the girl was removed from the cover and we just went with the misty forest and the full moon? Won’t that make it more haunting?

Kate’s suggestion describes the cover of Shiver, a book that has been quite popular (also about werewolves), and I think the cover is lovely, very striking. None of Maggie Stiefvater’s books have photos of teens on the covers: http://www.maggiestiefvater.com/novels.php

I was very sad at the bookstore to see that the beautiful, beautiful cover of If I Stay by Gayle Forman (one of my favorite new YA books last year) was replaced in paperback by a more generic and unappealing to me photo cover. Here’s a post from the author featuring the various international covers: http://www.gayleforman.com/blog/2010/03/09/choose-your-flavor/ I think the US PB is actually my least favorite. But of course I’m delighted the book is available in PB, and around the world.

Yes! I, for one, would much rather see it. Atmosphere is good. It sets the scene, but doesn’t give too much information that can be later proved wrong, or set in stone the visual parameters of the story.
If you look at this cover, and then read the book (I haven’t) you either take this picture with you on your travels through the story, OR you can be irritated at the mismatch of cover image with your own vision of the character.
AND I always wonder why beautiful girls are used to attract girls. It obviously works – if the fact it’s done so frequently in all of our visual media is an indication. I know women that are attracted to this. But why seeing women/girls that have attained those attributes helps us in the expression of our inner wishes to be as beautiful and thin as the images we see helps… is a mystery to me.

Yes, I really enjoy Maggie’s book jackets!
And thanks for the link to the Gayle Forman post. I think she nails it when she says of the original cover “it gets to the soul of the book without telling you a thing.” I love that.
Interesting to be able to compare all of these book jackets. The US paperback reminds me of “Newes From the Dead” by Mary Hooper. The main character of that book is presumed dead, but is depicted on the cover with her eyes open, and the picture looks like a regular picture turned sideways (I posted about it here: http://jacketwhys.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/dead-or-alive/). That’s what this looks like (I haven’t read this yet).
I had passed over “If I Stay” till now, but I’m moving it up the list :-)

Wow. I checked out the link to his other cover and you aren’t kidding! I loved so many of the other ones he did. Leviathan, Incarceron, the Holly Black ones… wow. I didn’t know they were all the same artist!
This one doesn’t bother me a lot, but I think I’ve kind of become numb to a lot of the werewolf/vampire/fallen angel covers…they tend to blend!

I really REALLY don’t like covers that feature photos of people. Especially the close-up face ones…BORING!! They are the LAST books I will pick up in the store as they do not catch my eye at all. This would have been so much better without the girl on the cover.

I agree, this cover looks like the 11 billionth Twilight rip off. Dark moody lighting, angst!ridden teen girl with sultry face… on one hand, it’s like a bullseye for people who have read the other 10,999,999,999 books out there that look like this. On the other, it repulses/bores just about everyone else.

I was wondering how you define Chicklit. Are you using the term to refer to all fiction that’s marketed to women and girls? For some reason, I never think of the paranormals as Chicklit, even the plethora of paranormal romances with the girly covers. Does a cover mark something as chick lit regardless of the content?

I know that you regard it as a problem that publishers try to market everything to girls (Paper Towns, anyone?), and I tend to agree that it’s tiresome and unfair to male readers and potential readers. One of our students chose Hunger Games as his SSR book, and came running back to the library in a couple of days begging for Catching Fire because HG was the first book he ever liked. It was so exciting and he was the first of many. Probably wouldn’t have even chosen the book if it had a picture of Katniss on the cover.

But I digress…. When I see a cartoony cover heavy on shopping bags, shoes, and shades of pink, I think chick lit. Soft focus, pastels, or pathetic looking pretty people: chick lit. I think Crusie and Picoult, Dessen and Rennison, not Meyer & co. Maybe, it’s because I can imagine boys willingly reading about werewolves and vampires, but not shopping, romance and certain kinds of domestic tragedies. I guess I don’t really like the term chick lit and the stereotypes it implies, but ironically I use the term and use it mostly for stuff I don’t read. So I guess I’d like to know how other people use it

I like the second one (Bobby) and the last one (Sarah). They are both quirky but very different. One has a real fifties feel and the other is more modern.

Though his cover isn’t my favorite, Michael Olivo’s endpapers and title page are great – the way Dorothy’s house seems to hover in the upper right corner of the endpage and then come down with a thud onto the bottom of the title page. Also like the series by Sarah Petruska – she’s talented!

Wow. I loved these. What’s always amazing to me is to see how many different versions of the same thing you’ll end up with in a class or group like this. They were all great, but I loved the ones by Leah and Michael. The 40’s vibe of his was very cinematic, I think, and I love how she uses the poppy trail to the city on the cover.

HaHaHa, there’s a liar image in there somewhere. It’s still the best audience-capturing image.

I’ve heard the entire background debate about the Liar jacket, and it actually makes complete sense if you have read it. The whole concept for that original image for Liar was that the entire package needed to be a lie, since the character was a liar throughout the book. The author is super opinionated, yet approved the original image. However, one blogger made it a racial issue that caught on like wild fire, the author got scared, and went against her company in fear of losing buyers, which in turn created a mass blog opinion tsunami.

Purely from a design standpoint, I actually thought that was a really awesome idea. Possibly not the best image, but the whole concept of lying to the public, without revealing the fact that the girl thinks she is a werewolf, is very cool.

Very few books make the whole package speak for the book. As much as it has been talked about, the team for the Liar jacket loved that book, and wanted to make it the coolest conversation about lying, not race, but people just love to have an opinion and created an industry scapegoat. Don’t get me wrong, the conversation needed to happen, BUT, most of the people that had an opinion about this book, never read it, will never read it, and just liked to put wood in the fire of nonsense.

Graphic designers up with sometimes 100 different compositions for a book cover, but then it is up to editorial/sales for positioning and changes. I like this blog, because no one knows that it takes 6-8 months for a jacket to actually be conceived, concepted, edited and approved.

Uh… I have to disagree with the idea that Justine “got scared” once bloggers “made it a racial issue.” If you read her blog, you’ll see she is tireless in fighting for racial diversity in young adult books. She didn’t speak out against the cover at first, but you’ll notice she didn’t say anything positive about it once it was released. That was deliberate. She didn’t want to speak out about it because she felt that would have been unprofessional, but behind the scenes she was actively trying to get the cover changed. Read her post here for more information.

Yeah! The Liar photo–I saw it immediately, too! I like all of the design possibilities they posted; it’s neat to see what stays and what goes from sample to sample.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Thanks for proving my point. You obviously weren’t part of the behind the scenes discussion. I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh, and please don’t get me wrong, the author was COMPLETELY correct in fighting for this issue. I was really just talking from a design perspective (since this is a book design blog). It was a really neat initial idea as an outside designer. And, I truly think more people should read it before having an opinion.

However, I do feel that it started the conversation with the wrong book, especially having read it, and knowing the background to it all. I am glad the conversation at least got started though because I noticed this problem a long time ago.