I’m always happy to admit it… I’m a sucker for a good book cover, and I completely judge a book by its cover.
(Honestly, doesn’t everyone?)
Have you ever walked through a book shop and noticed a lot of the same elements in the covers? There seem to be a lot of trends in publishing right now. In this special guest post, Desiree from Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers, talks all about some of the cover trends of 2020.
Here’s Desiree!
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As a new year passes, giving us more memes, films, music, last-minute Christmas gifts… there’s also another whole year of beautiful book covers to celebrate!
In the spirit of all of the “year in review” reflections that come around the new year, here is a post that will walk you back through the best book covers of 2019 — which still seem pretty consistent throughout 2020. (Although we don’t like to admit it, many of us readers do judge books by their covers.)
Though it’s impossible to give every single book cover its due, we can pick out some of the most popular patterns that cropped up this year. So without further ado, let’s turn to the 5 most interesting book cover trends.
Black, white and red
While millennial pink reigned graciously and unobtrusively on book covers in years past, 2019 saw the rise of color backgrounds that weren’t afraid to get all up in your face. One of the go-to color palettes was the striking, “regardez-moi” combination of black, white, and red. Vivid and bold, this color combo paired nicely with the range of fiery and controversial topics that many of the past year’s books covered.
How exactly this combo of black, white, and red appeared on the book cover was up to the designer’s discretion, and the design choices on display are fascinating to see. Both Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip boldly relied on white text over a black background with red imagery to draw eyeballs, while Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys created a classy, minimalist feel with its black text on a white and red background.
Finally, Caitlin Doughty’s Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? wins awards not only for its priceless title, but also for its sly, intriguing use of white text on a red and black (cat) background.
Faded photographs
As the adage goes, a photograph is worth a thousand words — and book cover designers fully committed to this principle in 2019. Fittingly for an age obsessed with Instagram, a photograph on a book cover can tell an insta-story of sorts, freezing a moment in time to represent the book’s story and pique a potential reader’s curiosity.
Naturally, this technique was already quite popular in both the memoir and nonfiction genres. But what about fiction books, where it’s ostensibly a bit riskier to get right? The results came last year, and they were pretty amazing. One only needs to glance at the cover of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, for instance, to be arrested by the story that its chosen photographs seem to tell.
Empirical by Lisa Gorton, in the meantime, settles on one representative photograph of an ancient statue in an art gallery to allude to its poems about memory and the past. Then there’s my personal favorite: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which features a permanently gorgeous black-and-white photograph of a tightly wound embrace. Its blurb says, “Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling” — all of which comes through in its photographic cover.
Snakes, snakes, and more snakes
Snakes on a plane? Please, that’s so 2016. In 2019, snakes on book covers made up one of the biggest trends of all. Book cover designers turned to our slithering, scaly friends more than ever, playing the sinuous shape of a snake off of other elements in striking arrangements. In particular, typography provided a great playground for snakes to charismatically wind, coil, and twine their bodies around.
It’s probably also pretty useful that snakes are so versatile as symbols. On the cover of Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, a blood-red and black snake foretells the “tale of power, privilege, dark magic, and murder” within. The snake on the cover of Anne Boyer’s The Undying, meanwhile, is compellingly combined with the image of a needle — a powerful omen of the book’s discussion of the cancer industry.
On the other end of the spectrum, the cobra on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is oddly beautiful, juxtaposed against delicate flowers on a blue background. It draws upon India’s tradition of snake charmers to represent its globetrotting coming-of-age story. And lest we forget, the snake’s darker iconographic potential, the black ones on the covers of Queen of the Conquered and The Queen of Nothing clue us into the themes of revenge, obsession, and politics that animate those dark fantasy books.
Scribbles on covers
This one isn’t exactly a new trend, but it definitely experienced a spurt of popularity this past year. The scrawls here weren’t made by an exacting developmental editor, but rather by the book designer.
Hand-drawn scribbles on the cover of Everything I Know About Love offer a diary feel, instantly inviting readers into the world of Dolly Alderton’s memoir. Then you’ve got the cover of Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing — which features a whole messy, incomprehensible ball of squiggles, capturing the messy relationship between men and women throughout the centuries. As you can see, such scribbles give the book cover an air of individuality and eccentricity — which takes me to my next and final trend of the year.
Hand-drawn lettering
Speaking of individuality, I’m excited to be able to talk about one of my favorite trends in book cover design. Hand-drawn type on book covers experienced a renaissance in recent years, and last year was no exception.
From David Means’ Instructions for a Funeral to Saeed Jones’ How We Fight For Our Lives, this kind of type immediately imbues a cover with distinctive personality. It’s even more thrilling to see how book cover designers experimented with the type on the cover (the idiosyncratic writing on the casket-shaped envelope on Instructions for a Funeral, for instance, poignantly points to the book’s subject matter.)
On the whole, 2019 was a fantastic year for beautiful book cover designs, and it’ll be even more interesting to see what trends stick around for the new decade. Only time will tell — but the exciting thing is that we’re all along for the ride.
About the Author:
Desiree Villena is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. She’s very passionate about helping independent authors reach their dreams, and enjoys reading and writing short stories in her spare time.
Interested in writing for Wonderfully Bookish? Click here to find out how.
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