Two weeks ago my wife and I were standing inside a large Barnes & Noble bookstore staring at the three bays of new science fiction and fantasy hard covers and trade paperbacks. In order to ensure that you readers do not think that I specifically selected an unrelated group of hideous book covers, I took a few photos while we there. First, a large photo of the first bay of new releases.
Next, two closer photos of the top half of that bay and the bottom half, giving you a better look at the book covers.
Next, harvested from a Google search, larger images of 18 of those book covers. If you look closely, you will see every single one of these books in those photographs above. These are all new releases. These are all on the shelves in hundreds of major bookstores nationwide. This is as good a representation as anything of what the major publishers think is exciting, visually arresting, and appealing to a reader. This is the current aesthetic. This is right now. This is what you might aspire to if you are majoring in art, illustration or design and would like to work in publishing. Look at these, and let that sink in for a moment.
These are the words that come to my mind. Hideous. Appalling. Pedestrian. Uninspired. Hackneyed. Mundane. Wretched. Repulsive. Bland. Unoriginal. Banal. A dozen indistinguishable shades of either cold blue or fiery red, stilted lifeless human figures, all of whom look as if they have been ripped straight from volume 7 of some long-running and completely unoriginal videogame series. Just an absolute mess of vapid and stupid images paraded over and over, reflecting back on themselves like an echo chamber of colossally bad design. I could go on and on, but you get the point. I know that my tastes are rather specific, but I do have an open mind and am very capable of seeing something of value and interest in an astonishingly wide variety of visual expression. Except for what you see above. I just cannot understand how a body of work like that can appeal to anyone. Almost all of those covers look the same. Almost all of those covers have incredibly dismal pathetic composition. Almost all of those covers sport a lifeless digital sheen and evidence of far too much tinkering with software. There is no vision, no imagination, nothing at all that hasn't been done already, probably hundreds of times, in every repetitive and toothless videogame franchise or bad comic book. It sickens me.
I spent a lot of time thinking, trying to understand just how we as science fiction and fantasy readers have come to the point where this is what it is believed we want to see on our book covers. One doesn't have to look back very far to find books with brilliant and beautiful covers, from the design and the composition to the original paintings and drawings that graced them. At the very least, even if those older covers were not all to your taste, there was variety. There were easily identifiable individual artists from Michael Whelan to Jim Burns to Bob Pepper to Gervasio Gallardo and on and on. With those covers above, I would feel very secure in wagering a large sum of money that no one other than the artists and maybe (although probably not) the art director could even identify the artist based on the image. That is, if there even is a single artist. Some of these look so heavily digitally manipulated that I am guessing they are "art by committee."
I was unable to come to any real conclusion until this past weekend, during a conversation with my wife. We were talking about how strange it was that Kodak, which was once worth $28 billion as a company, provided jobs for over 140,000 people, and was more or less the face of photography had gone bankrupt, supplanted by not just digital photography (in spite of the grim irony that Kodak had a role in developing the first digital cameras) but primarily by Instagram. You see, Instagram now has 100 million active users, 40 million new photos are posted each day, and dozens of the biggest brands in the world use Instagram as part of their marketing and outreach. If you take pictures of anything, you're probably using Instagram. Even I do. But here is where it gets interesting. Instagram was recently purchased by Facebook for around $1 billion dollars. Yet Instagram employs only 13 people. So in that long transition from Kodak and film and paper to Instagram and pixels, where did those 140,000 jobs go? How has technology, in this case, not been economically, aesthetically and culturally disruptive in negative and destructive ways?
I can't see this as anything other than another strand in the devaluation of the role and skills of the creative class. You may have already heard some version of this parable, so I apologize if this is old news. Imagine a large publisher that needs some quick digital illustrations put together to market an upcoming science fiction series. They contact a young artist, fresh out of art school, with a nice portfolio of work and the requisite technical skill. They pitch the project to this artist, and are careful to indicate that the compensation will either be minuscule or non-existent. What the new artist will not receive in terms of fair pay for their skill, imagination and work however is an "in" with this publisher for possible future projects. Plus, even more importantly, the art director says that the publisher will make sure the artist is credited for the work and that their web site is linked to in all online promos. In other words, the artist will be able to "get his work out there" for free! What could be better than that, right? I think to some of you reading this for the first time, you might be thinking "That sounds reasonable." Well, imagine it this way. Instead of publishing an art, you walk into a new restaurant in your town. You sit down, order a small sampling of the restaurant's best dishes, and then eat them. When the waiter presents you with your bill, you offer to pay maybe a tenth of what you owe, or even nothing at all. Instead, you tell the incredulous waiter that you will be sure to tell everyone you know that the restaurant serves delicious food and you will highly recommend that they go to the restaurant and eat there. You will, in other words, "get their name out there." How do you think that exchange will go? Will the waiter smile happily, clap you on the back, and thank you? Or will they call the management and, maybe, the police? I think the answer is obvious. So why is this kind of conduct considered acceptable for artists, illustrators and designers? Again, evidence of the thorough gutting and devaluing of the creative class.
And this, I think, is why we get the covers that we see above. The hideous, reprehensible, ugly, boring, indistinguishable, cheap, and forgettable covers. Because no one wants to pay. No one will pay for quality work. So no one gets quality work. Instead, all we get is crap.
One more point. I am sure that some would say "But this is what sells!" And I am sure they would be able to find Bookscan numbers and sales statistics that would seem to bear that out. But keep this in mind. That is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the kind of cover art you see in this post is ALL that publishers put out, OF COURSE it will sell. Readers aren't simply going to stop buying science fiction and fantasy books completely. Put another way, when 98% of the covers look like those above, and 2% are more interesting and unique, of course those 2% are going to sell in less quantity and represent a smaller and apparently less desirable segment of the market. So the publishers can keep riding this fallacy that the garbage above is what sells because there is no easy way to prove them wrong.
So that's the connection. That is part of why contemporary illustration and design for the most part looks as bad as it does. This is what they want, this is what we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.
EDIT: I should add one more thing. This kind of awful cover design is most prevalent in science fiction, fantasy, romance, and more or less all young adult fiction, especially from the larger publishers. It appears to be much less common in general fiction, where there is often a great deal of beautiful design work. I've got to ponder that correlation a bit more, but I suspect it may be because fiction is seen as "literary" and "serious" and "adult" and therefore "important" while genre fiction like sci fi and fantasy is still "stupid" and "juvenile." Which is, of course, completely wrong. But that is all a post for another day. In any case, I welcome your thoughts, observations, questions, and objections in the comments.
