Flipping through my feedly um... "feeds" this morning, I followed a link of a link of a link on Cherie Priests blog and found this (left). That's what I call a book jacket design. Maybe you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but that's just the sort of thing that would stop me in a store and make me read the back.

It always tickles me that when I talk about book covers, people think you're talking about the cover image in isolation, but a book cover also consists of the font on the front that can destroy even the best of books, the blurb on the back which is more important usually than what's on the front - get that wrong and you've blown it.

But the one thing I've never understood is how publishers can get away with printing "the number one international bestseller" on the cover when what I'm holding in my hands is a first edition hardback. Is that from advance sales? If so, surely that just means the distributors are shit hot at their job regardless of what the book is like. It certainly doesn't make it a good book.

I shouldn't go down this road. I will say all kinds of things I may later regret.

Back to work...