I am sure that many of you have noticed the trend as of late to publish or republish books with covers that echo that of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I am going to be completely honest and say that I do not like the Twilight books. I won't go in to detail here seeing as if I were going to do so, I would post a proper review analysing the books.
Anyway, here are just a couple of examples of what I am talking about:
Yup, both these covers mimic the red, black, and white colour scheme of the Twilight books but also a flower to be likened to the New Moon cover. There is also no missing that both editions have the words "Bella and Edward's favourite book" stamped on them along with the phrase "Love never dies..."
Then there is the Vampire Beach series. I haven't read this series but I didn't mind the old covers. They looked like they would make a nice colourful patch on a bookshelf and contributed to the novel nature of the concept of vampires on a beach. At the moment I think that many a YA reader's bookshelf must be threatening to turn into a wall of black. Such is the case with the new rereleases of Vampire Beach:
Then there is my current love, the Study Series by Maria V. Snyder:
At least these editions are not all red, black, and white but the allusion to Twilight is there with the glossy image over a black background and the novel title in lower case, raised white lettering. The Study Series has some really nice cover sets. I only ended up purchasing this set (which is the Australian set of covers) as I was able to get them cheap, otherwise I had planned to buy a different set online, such as this one:
The same goes for the Australian covers of Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth and it's upcoming sequel The Dead-Tossed Waves.
Again, I prefer the other covers available. I think that they carry the tone of the series better.
There is also a new cover for Valiant out. Poor Holly Black.
More books that I think have covers that are part of this trend:
There are a stack more out there but I am not going to spend the time and space listing them all when I am sure that everyone has probably spotted them about. If I think of any later that I haven't included that I think of are significance then I will come back and put them up. I'll put up the rest of the Australian Study Series covers for anyone interested as soon as I can find an image of them.
So, why do I even care about this? Oh, I know that we have all been told "don't judge a book by it's cover" but in truth it is really easy to find yourself doing. In this case, these book covers are telling me what audience they want to attract. As someone who really doesn't like Twilight I look at these covers and receive the message that these books are for Twilight fans. It can be very off putting. However, by fortunately putting aside the first impressions that they give, I have been able to find some really good books wrapped up in some of these "Twilightish" covers. Furthermore, I feel that some of these books being wrapped up to look like Twilight are nothing even like Twilight to be marketing it to that exact same audience. If you want the series to get good reviews and for the sequels to sell then isn't it better to target the kind of audience who usually read and like that type of book? Is merely being a Young Adult novel these days enough for it to be likened to Twilight? Is this is why I do not work in marketing?
Also, some interesting cases of the publishers not looking around to see if anyone was already using the stock image that they had selected:
If I am correct, De Beproeving by Tess Franke was published a few months before the Host.
Also this:
I could be wrong but I think that Twilight existed before this edition.
Who knows, that little tid bit of information might come in useful to someone ever doing trivia or something of the like and have to name two books with the exact same covers. Or maybe not...
Terra
