Long Time Coming has just won the Best Paperback Orginal Edgar Award. Would that fact influence you to try it irrespective of these covers?
What are your thoughts on the US (LHS), UK (RHS) and UK (paperback) (below) covers? Which would entice you most to pick the book up if you were not familiar with the books of Robert Goddard?
You can read an extract here.
Read the Euro Crime review by Geoff Jones of Long Time Coming.
Thank heavens publishers aren't relying on me to make purchases based on their covers - the only thing any of these would inspire me to do is walk past - the US one is just boring and the same-old silhouette man from the UK choices is getting tiresome now - it just looks too much like a hundred other books to stand out from the pack
ReplyDeleteAgree that the US cover is boring. I like the UK ones better as they are colourful, but the silhouette is so tedious as Bernadette says (Troubled Man had sillhouette AND snow, neither of which seemed at all relevant to the book, though it was "Swedish" but not set while it was snowing!).
ReplyDeleteI´d have no idea the US one was a thriller. I might pick the UK paperback though.
ReplyDeleteKaren - These covers are OK, and if I had to choose one it'd be the UK hardback. But the truth is, none of them would really entice me on its own merits...
ReplyDeleteGoodness yes I agree with Bernadette the US one is horribly boring. I prefer the UK hardback -- the p/back is messier. I've read the book and can't say either represents the contents, though.
ReplyDeleteThe 3rd one intrigues me more, the others don't speak to me at all.
ReplyDeleteThe UK covers are better than the very drab US cover (what were the publishers thinking?).
ReplyDeleteBut new designers and artists are needed to come up with inventive covers. Is this so hard? It's like there are boilerplate covers, templates to just insert in title and author.
I probably shouldn't admit this, but I sort of like the US cover if only because the running man silhouette seems a little overdone these days. The frames do at least refer to the stolen paintings in the book--I think I like the simplicity of it. Of course I picked up the book because I read about it ahead of time--it doesn't exactly scream suspenseful thriller either! :)
ReplyDeleteThey're all pretty dull, aren't they! The fonts are interesting - I would say that the US font is very American and the UK font very British. As in they are common in those countries.
ReplyDeleteI like the cover with the cobblestones best - least boring.
This is interesting and one of my pet peeves. From a librarian's POV, jacket art is very important because 99 times out of 100 it's the cover that makes the browsing reader pick up a book to borrow. My job was to buy the fiction for a large public library and I needed to make the best use of library funds. Sometimes just for my own interest if the library had both the US and the Uk ed of a popular fiction book, I would keep stats on which edition was borrowed more and it was always the UK ed with the more attractive cover. This gives me headaches as a book buyer (in a New Zealand public library) because the US ed is almost always substantially cheaper than the UK ed, and dare I say it, usually better bound and longer lasting, also very important to a librarian. But the cover art is so unattractive, borrowers tend not to give them a second glance. So I used to end up compromising and buying a copy of each edition.
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