Even with a terrible, terrible cover, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: What It Is, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going by Michael Wooldridge is selling rather well on Amazon, ranked #94,692 of all books sold on Amazon (as of March 22, 2021).
Over the past few months, I’ve seen way too many covers on newly published books that do a real disservice to the books, the authors, and the publishers. My question: Why are publishers allowing such horrible covers on their books? Is this an arty trend? To be so bad the cover becomes good in some distorted way?
All I know is that the trend is not working. So I’ve started up this Book Covers Hall of Shame to showcase what NOT to do when designing book covers and publishing books.
Here’s the cover below. What do you think? Good or bad? Would you buy the book based on the book cover?
The key standard whether a book cover is good or not is simple: Does it help to sell the book?
I don’t think this book cover does that.
About John Kremer
John Kremer is author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, the Relationships Matter Marketing program, and many other books and reports on book marketing, Internet marketing, social media, and book publicity. -- John Kremer on Book Marketing.