Bronze Reading Statue

Not try­ing to rehash the debate on the effec­tive­ness of cov­ers. I’d just like to make a state­ment about them. Obvi­ously, cov­ers are what attracts the reader’s eye. More or less, the cover is what makes a first impres­sion to the con­sumer. Cov­ers give you some sense of what the story is about with­out hav­ing read one word. In all hon­esty, I couldn’t tell you when was the last time I bought book solely on a cover but it has hap­pened.

All I ask, as a con­sumer, is that the con­tent of the book match the cover. There is con­tro­versy going on right now where a YA novel had the face of white girl on the cover but the char­ac­ter is actu­ally black. It is as some­one else pointed out, not an iso­lated incident.

How many times have we voiced our objec­tions to char­ac­ters whose fea­tures don’t match the cover model? Red hair when it’s actu­ally brunette? In this case with Liar, the char­ac­ter is a dif­fer­ent race alto­gether. It’s been stated that resul­tant cover was a mar­ket­ing deci­sion. Heh. Says a lot if it that is the case here but I am not going to delve into that on this blog.

That title seems ironic, doesn’t it? Any­way, to share my opin­ion on this sit­u­a­tion, I find that the pub­lisher was in the wrong doing what they did in deceiv­ing the con­sumer. For me, it’s straight up false adver­tis­ing. How­ever, after say­ing all of that, looks like the pub­lisher is really push­ing her book as I see Vine reviews are already up with an aver­age four star rating.

pic via takomabibelot