There’s the cliché advice, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” While that is good advice, few people heed it. The fact is, most people will judge a book by its cover. If you are an author and want people to buy your book, you better put a good cover on it.
Choosing a good book cover is all about meeting reader expectations. Every genre has its tropes and expectations. For example, I am a fan of a particular type of metal music. Usually, I can scan a collection of album covers and quickly pick out the music I like, even if I had never heard of the bands before. No doubt, whenever I do this, I will also pass up a lot of good music that I would have liked, simply because the cover didn’t match my expectations of the type of music in the album. As an author, you need make sure your book covers match reader expectations for the content of the book. If there is a mismatch there, you will likely suffer a lack of sales and poor reviews when readers who do buy your book find that it didn’t match their expectations for it.
It would be extremely helpful for authors if there were a tool for analyzing their books and suggesting proper covers that would match reader expectations of the books. Such a tool could analyze the text of the book (or just the summary), the book’s primary audience, and the genre of the book, then use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to determine the best cover images for the book.
There is a Twitter feed called This Band Isn’t Real, which uses AI to generate metal album covers. A similar concept could be applied to different media such as books and different genres.
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