Book covers of the damned

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. But they’re so, so wrong. I’m not sure how I came to find this site, but once found, it’s a guilty, addictive pleasure (well, more of a horrid fascination), because it’s all lousy book covers, all the time.

No, no—I mean really, really awful book covers. The titles stink. The graphics range from crude drawings to even cruder Photoshop mashups of images found through a Google search. The fonts are a typographer’s nightmare. The color schemes scream acid trip. Pull all those elements together & you get…well, you get precisely what you see.

A whole lot of them seem to be sci-fi/fantasy. No real surprises there—that’s the genre where if you’re going to self-publish an e-book, either you’ll whack something together on a computer or you’ll find someone on Craig’s List who’ll give you a “design” for $50. But crime (the more lurid, the better) & romance figure heavily in here, too.

The site apparently was just sitting around until one of the, ah, “authors” bitched to the collator about copyright violation (although all the images seem to be linked to their Amazon listings). Which of course sent the thing viral.

Welcome to the social network, honey.

It’s worth it to keep scrolling through the pages until you find Lumberjack in Love. (Okay, if you can’t be bothered, here it is on Amazon. It's the paperback version. Which you can own if you want to pay $4.99 plus tax/shipping. You moron.) Personally, I can’t get past the title. But the, er, graphic is just…

It doesn’t happen often, but I have no words.

Except to say that—even though a lot of these books are available to “borrow” for free on Amazon Kindle, I still wouldn’t spend the electrons on them.