As much as we like to complain about social media ruining our lives, if you do it right, you can make it into a welcome portal made up of all of your favorite things. By following certain accounts and blocking others, you can craft a tailor-made feed of pictures to look at and posts to read.
For readers, Instagram has become the place for book posts. We share photos of our dressed-up bookshelves, experiment with flat lays, props, and scenery to turn our books into supermodels, and show off our book-themed merchandise.
Looking at #bookstagram encourages me to make time in my day to read. As much as I love reading, I also sometimes need that encouragement. And what is more influential in shaping our lives than social media?
Bookstagram takes a solitary activity and turns it into a collaborative one. Booktubers share their latest recommendations or even reading vlogs, creating time lapse montages of themselves reading and breaking in to discuss the book after a long session. It’s like a virtual book club without the time commitment or requirement to be reading the same book. But lately, it seems to be the book covers rather than the books themselves that are getting all of the attention.
Redesigned covers
Publishing houses and bookstores have become aware of the popularity of displaying books on social media and have responded accordingly. Now, Barnes & Noble releases classic novels with new covers exclusive to their store. Publishing companies play around with fonts, color, and design to make sure that their covers are eye-catching and Instagram-worthy.
Readers gravitate towards these covers like moths to a flame. We show off our new finds. They are displayed in optimal background and lighting with just the right props or poses. We hold up covers with giant faces on the front in front of our own so that the flat image blends with our 3D body. We pour a cup of tea and make fancy pastries to display next to our favorite reading spot. There are even photos of readers actually opening the book, lost in mid-read. But are we really reading them?
Buying books only for the covers
If there’s one thing we all know to be true but often forget about social media, it’s that it’s an illusion. We don’t all vacation in the Bahamas, eat mounds of junk food but look like super models, or live in luxurious mansions. We know it, but we forget it, and we fall for the illusion.
I recently asked on Twitter “what most motivates you to buy/read/borrow a book?” Nearly 50 percent of the “readers” chose the cover. I hear the same thing in reading vlogs, Instagram, and even Goodreads reviews.
“I saw the cover and just HAD to buy this book.”
Two things happen to me when I see a pretty cover displayed online. The social media scroller in me thinks, “Oh wow. That’s so pretty.” I like the post and even make a note to look for it the next time I’m in a bookstore. Even some of the greatest books of all times have had historically ugly covers. So, if they have found ways to improve the cover, it may be worth buying a nicer copy.
But the writer in me cringes when the cover is given more importance than the story. And when the poster says, “I’ll probably never read this book” or “I’ve read this book before and I didn’t like it, but I love the cover. So, I bought it,” the writer in me screams, “Nooo!”
Why are we reviewing books that people aren’t reading?
As writers, we think of writing as a solitary creation. It all falls on the writer and the writer alone to make a good book that people want to read. The results of my poll showed me that this was not the case.
Even more alarming was the fact that that the option that received the least votes in my poll asking what inspires a reader to buy a book was, “reading a good review.” As a book reviewer, it made me wonder why I even bother to write these big long book reviews. If it’s not going to inspire readers to read the book, what am I even doing?
We all know that Amazon reviews are hugely important for an author, especially an indie author. We beg for reviews, giving away free copies, submitting requests to book reviewers, and sometimes even paying for reviews. But what we didn’t realize is that we should be focusing just as much, if not more, on our cover designs in this image-driven era.
Book covers sell books
As an indie author, I’ve been through the cover design process. And I’ve turned out some pretty awful covers. It’s not that I thought that covers didn’t matter. I just had no concept of marketing, graphic design, or the tools and skills to design them.
I didn’t think much about marketing. The story would speak for itself, right? But you can’t see the story from the front of the book. The cover gets readers in the door, especially if you don’t have a successful name to paste onto the byline.
As an indie book reviewer, I know not to judge a book by its cover. Sometimes I want to mention the cover in my review, good or bad. But it doesn’t feel like my job. My job is to review the story, not praise or berate an indie author for hiring or not hiring a graphic designer.
At the same time, we’re not in the dark ages. We don’t write our books with quills and tie the animal skins together with string. We have the tools and opportunity to create polished, professional pieces, and an eye-catching design will attract interest. So, why shouldn’t we?
Conforming to an aesthetic
At the same time, it feels like we’re all trying to copy and paste the aesthetic that successful readers and Booktubers have established. We string twinkle lights over our white bookshelves and decorate with Pop Figures and Harry Potter wands. And as a result, everyone’s social media profiles look the same. Pretty, but the same.
Everyone has a photo of Red, White and Royal Blue and Where the Crawdads Sing displayed on their Instagram profiles. Everyone is showing off the latest copy of Jane Eyre with a gold foil cover and flowery script. But do they really love these books, or are they just there for clickbait?
It reminds me of the classic look of private libraries in big, old homes with built-in wooden bookshelves full of thick, hardcover books that all look like volumes of encyclopedia. Then, when you get up close, you see that most of these books are just fake, hollow stacks made up to look like a collection of book spines displayed on a shelf. They don’t have old, worn paperback copies of beloved classics. They just want to look intelligent and show off their extravagances.
Today, our bookshelves are brighter and more diverse. But they’re still not always authentic. They’re not always the shelves of an avid reader. They are a stage to make people think they are avid readers.
Testing their taste
Despite my frustrations with those in the online book community who use books essentially to get followers and likes, I have to give them credit for promoting reading in general. Reading is a time-consuming activity that can easily take a backseat to easier to digest forms of entertainment. Despite the dozens of books that I read in a year, I have been known to skip a reading session in exchange for a TV show, movie, or podcast.
So, even if they aren’t reading the books themselves, maybe they are inspiring others to read them so that they feel relevant. I admit that seeing the same bestsellers pop up on Instagram and YouTube have inspired me to give books a try that I otherwise would have skipped over.
Women’s fiction and nonfiction books about diversity and reframing history tend to take center stage on Instagram, along with whatever Reese Witherspoon is reading. It’s a very female-centric community, despite all of the male readers and writers out there.
Everyone wants to look relevant and well-read on trendy topics. We want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. We also want to feel like a part of the slow but steady change towards giving voices to underrepresented groups and redefining traditional concepts like relationships, mental health, and self-identity.
So, over the past year or so, I have made room in my reading schedule to check out these popular titles. And what I’ve found is, they often range from okay to not for me. I’ve been genuinely surprised by how much better the indie titles I’ve been reading and reviewing on my blog are in general over the popular books that everyone has been raving about online.
Today’s cover designs
Sure, the covers of these bestsellers are often superior for sure. They definitely benefit from their publishers’ teams of designers who have cultivated today’s modern book cover design.
These design schemes include giant fonts that fill the cover with their titles and author names. They include bright colors, especially for the romance genre, with pastel backgrounds and eye-popping shades. They use a minimalistic design to represent their characters with round, almost stick-figure shapes and featureless faces that give off the gist of a character as they are described in the book but allow the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations.
Clearly, these designers know that today’s readers want a cover that will photograph well. They know the aesthetic of Bookstagram is all about the pastel color schemes and flowery scripts. Realistically drawn images and boxy fonts that look like cigarette advertisements from the 70’s and 80’s just aren’t going to translate well to the cookie-cutter aesthetic of the online book community.
Even I keep this asethetic in mind when I’m creating images for my Instagram when promoting a book review. If a pretty background will compliment a pretty cover, I’m going to base it off of the popular images that I see on Instagram. I also study the props, backgrounds, and display styles to get ideas for my photos. But I don’t want my Bookstagram to look like everyone else’s. This technique might not get me thousands of likes, but it does help to maintain my unique style while pulling the elements from more influential Bookstagrammers that will make that style better.
Is our obsession with book covers ruining the book industry?
In the end, books and reading haven’t changed. We may read them on digital devices and listen to them being read to us in many cases, but readers read because they want to hear a story. And many readers have always bought books faster than they could devour them. But readers who don’t write should know that to declare that you’re only buying a book for the cover is like a knife in the heart of a writer, even if you’re not talking about a book that they have written.
Our fascination with photographing everything and displaying those photographs online isn’t going away. So, we writers have to adapt. Indie authors especially need to put the work into their covers, whether it’s learning design themselves or outsourcing help from a professional. We need to keep up with the changing industry, and that’s not a bad thing. If anything, a good cover paired with a good book is the perfect combination.
We can’t control whether our books get read, even if we find a way to get the books to sell. Once it’s in a reader’s hands, it’s up to them how long it sits in their TBR pile, whether it’s donated or lent out, or even used as a door stop or coaster. So, if the only use they’re going to get out of it is a photo for their Instagram, make sure it’s a photo worth taking. And make sure that if they do crack the book open, it’s a story worth reading.
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Made me turn round to look at my bookcase, albeit that’s mostly spines of course.
I have to admit, once i’d seen the cover of ‘The Colour of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett, he had me at suitcase with legs and from that point on, the cover was a part of the anticipation of every book of his as it hinted at little bits of the story or characters.
What was the percentage that read the blurb on the back and then purchased?
I love this analysis of how much of an impact visual appeal has on a buyer! It is almost manipulative how much thought goes into covers; the colors and fonts become hooks reaching out.
I took a good look at my bookcase after reading this and was just a little bit happy to see most of the books on my shelf either have no covers or are quite plain. My copies of Agatha Christie, writing companions, and even my Nancy Drews are simple. The artwork on my massive hoard of Star Trek novels is, often, atrocious too! 😂
No, what draws me to a book is either a franchise or a killer blurb. That the book looks snazzy is a massive bonus but, when buying editions of classics or browsing, my eyes are admittedly drawn to covers so lovely I want to own them. Ultimately, though, I respect good writing so I am always a little disappointed when I find amazing self-published authors who have not honored their words with good cover art.
Thanks so much for sharing this thought provoking read!
When I first started watching booktube it took me a few videos by different booktubers to notices that they all have the same books.
I buy a majority of my books used and I could care less how my books look. I am proud to have a wide diversity of books from different genres and different authors. I do not want my book shelves to be a cut and pace of everyone else.
What draws me to a book is the synopsis and that all.