Another season of catalogs means another round of YA books getting new looks in their paperback editions. Some of these cover changes are good ones, while other ones seem to miss the mark. In addition to the four books I’m rounded up to talk about, I thought it would be fun to also include a book that got not one, not two, but three different cover designs before it even got published (and it’s not publishing until this summer, so it may even see another one).

As always, I’d love your thoughts on any of the changes, and I’d love to see if you’ve found any recent changes worth nothing. Original hardcover designs are on the left, with their paperback redesigns on the right.

The recovering of Lauren DeStefano’s Perfect Ruit is not only one I’m behind, but I think the paperback edition might be one of my favorite covers in a long, long time. The hardcover isn’t bad, but it’s pretty similar to a lot of other covers in YA right now. It’s a girl in a dress, and the design around here looks sort of steampunk, even though it’s a utopian novel. The font for the title isn’t my favorite; the “Perfect” lettering is too boxy and stiff, and that’s carried over into the author’s name, too. While I don’t mind the way “Ruin” looks, I don’t like how the bottom of part of the “R” is cut off for the line running from the bottom of “N” and down around the edge of the cover and back.

If you look closer at the original cover, there’s a lot going on. There’s a couple of dangling keys, a firefly, constellations in the background, and what look like small ornaments hanging in the tree branches above the girl’s head. They’re a little obscured for me because my eye is drawn right to the center of the cover, to the bright red “Ruin” and red dress the girl is wearing. I suspect those small elements play a role in the story, but it’s very easy to overlook them.

The paperback for Perfect Ruin though — it’s eye-catching in its minimalism. The all-black background with a crisp, white bird statue being shattered is immediate and it’s immediately captivating. The smaller-than-expected title done in all white, along with the smaller-than-expected author name is understated to a great effect. While the cover doesn’t tell a whole lot about the story, it’s engaging and piques my curiosity. I know there’s a story here, and I want to know why what looks like perfection in the form of that ceramic bird has been shattered. This is an excellent redesign, and the companion book, Burning Kingdoms, is getting a similarly striking design.

Perfect Ruin will be available in paperback March 2015.

I read Julie Berry’s All The Truth That’s in Me last year and felt pretty middle-of-the-road about it. Great writing, but the story itself didn’t necessarily work for me, and I found the ambiguous time period setting to be more irritating than creative. That translated to how I felt about the cover, too. The girl on the cover has a very modern look to her in terms of how she’s wearing her hair and her makeup (the dark eyes especially). She didn’t match up with the image of the main character I had in the least. More, though, the girl on the cover is wearing an ambiguous shirt that could either translate into something that members of a cult might wear — that’s fitting, maybe, with the story — or as an outfit worn during a specific historical period of time, which would contradict the very modern style of the girl’s makeup and hair. The cover doesn’t tell readers more about the story than the story does, and in this case, some of the questions I had and other readers had (via reviews) aren’t cleared up.

What does work on the cover is the tear across the girl’s mouth. That’s a huge part of the story, and I think the design nails it. This is a book that digs into what it means to be silenced and what it means when your capacity to speak up is taken from you, and I think it’s conveyed here.

In paperback, the book has an entirely different look and feel to it. The girl is gone, replaced instead by a flower. There’s one petal that isn’t “pretty” like the rest of them, as it looks like it’s infected. Gone is the blurb on this cover, replaced with a tag line that’s more interesting: “Her words could ruin him, but her silence will destroy them both.” While I think the tag line does tell the story, I think it’s a little too “sexy” for what the story actually is about.  I’m not a huge fan of the gold font, nor the gold coloring of the flower, as I think it might be trying to convey that ambiguous time period setting again.

Maybe most interesting to me is that the paperback looks like it’s appealing to an entirely different readership than the hardcover is. The hardcover looks like many other YA titles (big face of a girl style), whereas the paperback looks much more literary and like the kind of book you’d find in the adult section of a bookstore or library. I suspect without the girl, it might better reach adult readers, who will be curious what the story could be about since the cover doesn’t tell you a whole lot. This is a good cover — better than the hardcover, I think — but it’s not necessarily one that gives a whole lot of insight into the story. In this case, that might be a positive thing, as it’s also not further complicating some of the story’s unanswered questions.

The paperback edition of Berry’s All The Truth That’s in Me will be available August 14, 2014.

I’m not sure what to make of the redesign of Lauren Kate’s Teardrop. The hardcover for this one is pretty standard, popular YA cover design. It’s not bad, but it’s not necessarily the most memorable or striking. The thing is: it works. The readers who are fans of Kate’s work will know this is the book for them and be drawn to it.

The paperback redesign, though, is even less memorable. It’s a giant face, with a closeup of a blue eye, and the title of the book is made so huge to take away from the image behind it. The new design adds a tag line that isn’t on the hardcover — “One tear can end the world” — which doesn’t really tell readers a whole lot, either. The author’s name is in a crisper font, but beyond that, I’m not sure this cover is any better than the hardcover. In fact, I would say that the hardcover in this case does better at speaking to teen readers who love these kinds of books. The paperback doesn’t even offer a pretty dress (one that’s disappearing!) to enjoy.

Teardrop will be available in paperback October 28, 2014. The hardcover of book two in the series, Waterfall, will be available the same day and carry the same design to it: a big face with a big title.

I think books that are published at the very end of the year can be easily missed. Part of it is that it’s just a busy time of the year, and part of it — at least in library and school land — is budget cycle. If you’re in a library that requires trade reviews for books, and your budget needs to be spent before the end of the year, it’s easy to not know about the December books unless there’s huge marketing behind them.

Audrey Couloumbis’s Not Exactly A Love Story came out in December 2012 and . . . I didn’t even know this book existed until I was doing some catalog browsing for cover changes to write about. Reading the description and looking at the original cover, it’s not clear this is a historical novel in the least (it’s set in 1977). The title doesn’t tell a whole lot about it either, except that it’s not your typical love story, despite the fact the image on the cover is of a couple partaking in what could be called a typical love story embrace. The color choices in the cover and the use of non-standard shapes to highlight some of the words in the title are jarring. This isn’t your standard YA cover, but it’s also not the most appealing one. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t look like every other cover. I would see a good argument that this design dates the cover in a way that might be telling of the story’s setting. 

When I saw the paperback edition of the book, my first thought was that it was going for the Eleanor & Park look and low and behold, the description for this book in Edelweiss said this: “This quirky, flirty, and smart story will appeal to fans of Frank Portman’s King Dork, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines, and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.” They know exactly what audience they want to target with this new look, and I think they nail it. As I’ve talked about before, there’s no question that the new trend is to compare everything to Green and Rowell and that cover designs are increasingly trying to mimic the illustrated covers of Rowell’s books. 

 I quite like the new look, and I dig how the houses sort of look like faces that are close to one another (this is maybe more obvious with the house on the left than the one on the right). I like the use of the landlines in the lit-up rooms of both homes, and I think the font that was used for the title gives a sweetness that is missing in the original cover. Interestingly, I think that the redesigned cover appeals to a much younger audience than the original cover does. Perhaps because of how it’s designed, how the focus is less on the paper or the love story, and how the font selection and starry sky just look like many a middle grade novel. 

Not Exactly A Love Story will be available in paperback July 22. 

The final cover redesigns I wanted to talk about are for a book not even out yet: Miranda Kenneally’s Breathe, Annie, Breathe. The cover on the far left was the first iteration, and it mirrored the trend of illustrated designs. It was interesting to watch the feedback that came from readers on this cover. While it wasn’t disliked, it didn’t match the other books Kenneally had written. Though this new book is set in the same world as Kenneally’s others, the books aren’t sequels. They don’t need to look alike, but many readers wanted them to maintain a similar look and I agree — at least when it comes to reader’s advisory and when it comes to getting books into the hands of teens, having that similar look helps a lot. This is especially true when you’re time-strapped or can’t read all of the books out there (who can?). The cover here isn’t bad, but it’s unexpected and contrasts with the look and feel of Kenneally’s other books. Note the tag line: “The finish line is only the beginning.”

The cover in the middle was the second iteration, and it looked much more like the rest of the books set in this world than the first cover. We know this is going to be a novel about an athletic girl. It’s not necessarily the most memorable, but it fits both the story description and the world in which the story is set. Not the tagline: “Sometimes letting go is the only way to hold on.” That’s quite different than the initial tag line.

Just days after the second cover was revealed, a third redesign came up for the book. This one might be the best one, though: it not only fits the rest of the books set in this world, but it’s striking and memorable in a way that the second one wasn’t. It’s clear the girl is an athlete here, but what’s most notable in the design is the large use of a blue background. It’s bright and will stand out on shelves the way that the girl running into the distant sunset wouldn’t. The design went back to the font used in the initial cover design, too, and to good effect. Perhaps this cover is the marriage of the illustrated cover — the clouds on the blue background — with the stock image cover — the girl on the ground, post-run. Tag line: “The finish line is only the beginning . . .”. The tag line works well with this cover, and I kind of like that there’s an ellipsis to round it out.

Breathe, Annie, Breathe will be available July 14, and worth noting: this is a hardcover release, whereas Kenneally’s prior releases were paperback originals. Perhaps that was part of the initial decision-making in changing the cover look so drastically? Whatever the reason, I think the final compromise is the strongest.