I’ve got a four cover double takes — it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?
Same model in Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize as in Julie Hearn’s Ivy, though it’s the opposite side of her face and a much tighter crop. It’s interesting to me how both of these covers have some sort of green in the background. That makes the red pop a little more. Both of these books are a few years older, but the same cover model makes an appearance in a paperback released this year:
I don’t care for how the cover of Cecelia Ahern’s The Book of Tomorrow looks, and I find the cover model head to be sort of oddly chopped off and placed on it. I like how her red hair is enhanced (I mean, how often do you see a red curly haired girl? Not often, says a girl with red curly hair). But the cover set up doesn’t work for me — I dislike how the title is all lowercase and then the author’s name is in all caps. Then the tag line is in standard caps-lowercase styling. The book image is more than half of the cover, too, then suddenly a girl’s head sprouts from the top of it. It feels out of place. It also looks to me like the orange color of the font is different from the red color of the girl’s hair, but that might just be my screen’s resolution or a result of the image being digital rather than in print.
It’s the same model in Denise Jaden’s recent Never Enough as it is in Mara Purnhagen’s Haunting the Night, an ebook novella released in August 2011. The girl’s image has been flipped, so that she’s looking up and to the left in Jaden’s cover and up and to the right in Purnhagen’s cover. But let’s talk about how different the backgrounds of the images are. I quite like the Jaden cover background because it’s quiet. It’s all white with just some wisps of branches in the background. There’s something simple and clean about it that makes it stand out a little bit to me. Knowing the Purnhagen book is an ebook release only makes talking about what it’d look like on a shelf silly, but I do think it’s a little busy. I love the color, but the girl is definitely swallowed up by the heavy coloring and clouds. Also, that balloon above the title is distracting me and also amusing me.
One of my favorite covers in recent memory is the one for Ilsa J Bick’s Drowning Instinct. It is eye-catching. I love the way the girl is sideways, the way the water falls off her face, the blue background, and the way it just fits the story. I had never seen a cover like it . . . until I saw the cover double on Pamela Callow’s Damaged, which actually published before Bick’s title. What’s most interesting to me is not just the same treatment of the cover model with the water dripping down, but even the blue background is quite similar. The biggest difference in design choice is that the Callow cover isn’t as tightly cropped as the Bick cover model. But you know, I still think this cover is great and it works in both cases.
Pip Henry’s I’ll Tell You Mine published this year in April — it’s an Australian title. There’s only half a face in the cover, but you can see the whole girl’s face on Susan Bischoff’s 2010 self-published title Hush Money. Both are fairly striking covers, I think: I love the pale face with the dark eyes and eye makeup against the dark background (though Bischoff’s girl is definitely pinker than Harry’s). Both use fairly simplistic fonts for their titles but they’re strong enough font-wise to also stand out against the black behind it. It’s interesting to note that Harry’s cover has a girl with dark lips and dark nail polish while Bischoff’s cover has no nail polish on the girl’s finger and a nude lip. The stripe of red on the cover of the book on the right stands out a little bit, but overall, I think both of these covers work. It’s rare I like a cover with a face on it, but this one says a lot about the book without saying much at all.
Any additional doubles to these covers above? Like any of the treatments better than another?
