Recently I've been reading a great site where self publishers submit their book cover designs, so that people can critique them and they can make them better - and not end up with a cover that screams 'self published'.
One of the books recently was a Christian book, and everyone seemed concerned that it didn't look 'Christian' enough. Which puzzled me, as there are so many genres of Christian books that I would expect them all to look different. And I certainly wouldn't expect any explicitly Christian imagery on them.
Anyway, I thought I'd check it out. So I did a quick survey of Christian book covers - ones on display on my church bookstall, and ones from my own shelf that have new-ish covers (after 2000).
Photos below, with captions which are not really relevant to the question :-)
Typographic covers with no imagery at all are very common.
Of course, a selection of books from a different church (or even the same church in a diffeerent month), and from another individual's book case might look completely different.
The point is that what matters is not that it 'looks Christian', but that it looks like the kind of Christian book the ideal reader likes to read (because all Christians do not like all Christian books, obviously).
[Edit: I was looking at imagery only, someone pointed out that the titles of most of those books do make it clear it's a Christian book. The problem is if nothing does.]
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| *I really like the 'FOR YOU' series of book covers. This is one of the less interesting ones. *Some of these covers are terribly boring. *My church is not unhealthily obsessed with Revelation - we just happen to be doing a preaching series on it just now! |
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| *Could the cover for The Historical Reliability of the Gospels be any more boring? *A Biblical History of Israel has typical commentary design - brown, with a historical painting. *True Friendship looks like a book on homosexuality, which it isn't. Adding another figure to one group would have solved that. *The CS Lewis covers look nice, but don't reflect the content at all. Miracles gives the impression it's about seeing life as a miracle with childlike wonder or something. It's not. It is about do real supernatural miracles happen? *I would never have chosen God knows your name based on the cover. But as it was a present I read it, and it's good. And not the kind of book suggested by the cover at all (but maybe the kind of cover the target audience likes?) |
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| *These fiction books have more saturated, warmer colour scemes in general. *The ones written by women all have a large photo of a face. The ones written by men either have no face or a small one. |
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