Look at "men's" books... the covers are all the same too. A ticking bomb, a man scaling a wall, a hand holding a briefcase.

And how about movie posters? If it's an action film, there is a car, an explostion, and the face of a scowling dirty hero. If it's a women's movie, it's a wistful man and woman in different frames, looking away from each other, plus some small building on a distant hill, and maybe some flowers.

In other words, this article is pretty much useless. ALL covers are designed to be used for judging the contents.

Now that you mention it, yes, just like the Broadsheet logo. Except many book covers are even worse.

Librarians don't love to say shh! Sorry, just had to throw that in there :)

Obviously, someone is buying and reading this crap. The publishers just keep rehashing the same stuff over and over, like over 30 years of bad reruns of Cosmo.

Imagine you walk into a book store, you have no idea what you feel like reading, because you didn't go in with a suggested reading list. I don't think it has anything to do with thinking people are stupid, it's just that certain cultural images will tell a person in a second weather they should stop and pick that book up or not. It's why there are different covers for the same book in different countries. It's not surprising many chick lit books feature martini glasses, heels, lipstick and shopping bags and stick thin women. That tells me in a second that the book will be about a professional woman in a large city. Probably single and weight concious and she'll whine about it a lot. Great, now I don't have to bother looking at it, even if has an interesting title.

Each genre has it's own sort of set of identifiable images, most people who buy books only purchase a favorite genre and usually only venture outside of their genre based on a recomendation from a friend or newpaper review.

When you are in a bookstore you are scanning thousands of images in seconds, the publishers want you focusing on the genre you are interested in, so they use a set of easily identifiable images.

A book with the picture of a woman without a face, means hey lady, here's a book where you can imagine yourself being her, do you like that type of book filled with feelings and relationships and maybe some sex? Great, this book is for you.

A book with photgraphed jewlery, means literary relationship fiction. A book with cartoon jewlery means throwaway beach read.

I like that there are identifiable sets of images, I don't want to spend hours and hours in the bookstore.

Most of the photos are from stock photo houses, which means a lot of other companies might be using the photo. So if you "just crop it so" and "distort it like this" you will be using the same photo only it would look different.

Also if the model becomes famous, she might come back and haunt the publisher, author and all parties concerned for for mo' money.

Besides, you are selling a book (hopefully, one with literary value), you are not selling porn or the latest beauty tips.

In other words, you want to sell your work on its merits not because the model on the cover looks hot: although it wouldn't hurt.

ha ha ha. modern feminists think women are stupid too. comes from looking in a mirror i guess.

My first week at school a big, butch lesbian (really nice lady with a very impressive beard) showed our Animals Rights group a slide show on this subject. Of course the photo I remember best is the Hustler cover with the girl half way down the meat grinder (only her well heeled legs are visible). The big argument is that women are viewed as meat much as animals are.

But I don’t see that Hustler photo having much at all do with (just for argument sake) the ‘Good in Bed’ cover art. I think the reason chick lit uses body parts is that so we, as readers, can all see ourselves playing the part of that heroine. Keeping her vague allows us to see ourselves in that period dress or on that beach. Putting a face on the cover of a book can limit the appeal.

I have also noticed that trashy men’s books (anything made into a film starring Harrison Ford) use the same techniques to lure readers in. You never see the hero’s face either.

is one of the purest most field-proven distillations in terms of assessing what is topmost on a certain consumer group's mind.

Apparently, women are obsessed with partly exposed female body parts, whatever THAT means.

Women refuse to carry themselves in a way that elicits confidence that women are NOT stupid. They constantly contradict their own positions, weasel out of others, and express no interest in intllectual pursuits BEYOND counting grievnaces against men.

In the modern fascisto-feminist model, women are supposed to be granted the benefit of the doubt and treated with automatic respect and as if they are all smart. This is but one point at which the artifice edifice of PC feminism fails.

(For you ready to jump my throat, I am talking about the majority of women, but by no means ALL WOMEN. There is a good 10-15% of women who are both smart AND ambitious and who run with some internal consistency and logic)

Sometimes not even that. It's just how they're marketed. Non-fiction book covers tend to be better, since they're actually trying to convey information about the book's contents.

In an interesting coincidence, just the other day I had to break the news to my 14-year old son that neither the scantily clad babe on the cover of his book nor the monstrous snake she was hacking with a sword were to be found within its pages. As the old song goes:

There's a bimbo on the cover of my book,
There's a bimbo on the cover of my book,
She is blonde and she is sexy,
She is nowhere in the text, She
is the bimbo on the cover of my book

There's a dragon on the cover of my book,
There's a dragon on the cover of my book,
He is big and green and scaly
He is nowhere in the tale, he
Is the dragon on the cover of my book.