You’ve probably heard the phrase, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” before. Is it true though? Statistics say about 75% of people use the cover to decide if they will purchase a book. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right though.

What’s on the cover doesn’t really determine what will be inside. Some covers tell you a lot about the book. For example, the cover of the sixth Keeper of the Lost Cities book, Nightfall tells you a good bit about the story.

Just from the cover, you can see three key characters from the story, Sophie, Keefe, and Linh. If you have read the other books in the series, you can probably infer that the setting of the cover is Atlantis.

On the other hand, if you look at the cover of Counting by Sevens, by Holly Goldberg Sloane, you pretty much just see a bunch of fish. So, even though some covers tell you a lot about the story, some don’t really tell you anything.

Another thing is that some books that were written a long time ago don’t have covers that are as aesthetic to us as books written more recently. If you compare an older cover of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, to a newer cover, you’ll see that even though they are for the same book, they’re really different. The cover designed more recently is probably more appealing to you, just because it was created to match more modern standards.

A lot of book covers these days are designed to be physically appealing and catch your eye. Some books aren’t quite as exciting as the cover, but others are much more than what you’d expect from a first glance.

It’s okay to judge a book by its cover, just don’t stop there. Read the back and take a peek inside. You never know what adventures might be hiding just beneath the surface.

Sources:
https://writerssa.org.au/2014/cant-judge-book-cover-can/