Book Cover Data Analysis

Disclaimer

The first place I need to start is with a disclaimer. Assessing any kind of artwork, including book covers, is something of a subjective experience. I did my best to try and break the data into objective categories, but no true distinction exists. There were times where a book cover could have easily fit into one category or another and I made a judgment call into which category they belonged in.

Methodology

Next, we need to discuss the methodology used. Originally, I thought that I would pull the data from the top 100 books on Amazon but that became a more difficult question? The top-1oo…what? Fantasy? Sci-fi? Romance? Experienced readers know that each genre has common types of book covers they use. If there are beautiful and scantily clad men and women on the front of the cover, then the book is likely going to be romance. If it’s a hand-drawn portrait of adventurers slaying a dragon, then it’s likely to be fantasy.

With that in mind, I decided to pull the 100-best sellers from Amazon in general. This included all kinds of books over a swath of genres. The next thing I noticed was that many of the same books dominated the Amazon charts for much of the year. For example, the refreshed Harry Potter covers have been Amazon Best Sellers since they were published. I looked at every best seller for the entire year of 2019 and couldn’t find a week where Mr. Potter didn’t dominate the list.

Categories

In order to gather enough covers to be of statistical relevance, I needed to look at all of the covers for every book ever posted to the Amazon Best Seller in the year 2019. This led to the creation of six separate categories.

1. Typography-based

2. Minimalist

3. Hand-Drawn/Hand Painted Artwork

4. Photography 

5. Digital Art

6. Hand-Drawn Realism

Typography-based

Typography-based covers are those covers where the typography is clearly the most important part of the cover. I understand that this is something of an ambiguous distinction because typography is important to any cover. However, there were clearly covers where the typography was the art so to speak. Take, for example, Junk by Les Bohem. Clearly the cover could be considered abstract or minimalist, but the cover is clearly driven by the typography rather than the artwork.  

Minimalist

Compared to minimalist covers where the typography might be important, but the symbolism in the artwork itself clearly drives the image that readers are supposed to take from the book. A great example of two different kinds of minimalist covers are the Killer Collective by Barry Eisler and Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty. Killer Collective is designed with bold, attractive colors. The typography is more pronounced over the comparatively subdued cover on Nine Perfect Strangers, but I wasn’t sure how to create another category of books without making the line between minimalist and typography-based almost non-existent.  

Hand-Drawn/Hand-Painted Artwork

Hand-drawn or hand-painted covers are pretty standard to readers. They’re usually found in fantasy novels. These kinds of books came in a couple of variants as well. Like previously mentioned, the refreshed covers from the Harry Potter series were considered to be hand-drawn/hand-painted in this assessment. Although, the argument could be made that they could count as minimalist covers as well. A more clear example would be What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon.  

Photography

The photography category were marked by those books that used actual photos for their covers. Once again, there were some books that rode the line between one category and another. For example, in The Savior by J.R. Ward, the cover is a photo that has been digitally adjusted to fit the content of the book. It’s something of a counterpoint to the Girls of Glass by Brianna Labuskes where the cover of the book is clearly more photography based. Obviously, every one of these images has been digitally enhanced or photoshopped, but I wanted to make a distinction between these kinds of covers and the next category.  

Digital Art

The most popular category by far was digital art. This is almost a catch-all category for many of the covers that readers are familiar with. Redemption by David Baldacci is a perfect example. In my opinion, these covers are usually cheaper looking but they get the point across. There isn’t necessary anything that stands out to me about these covers because they are so prevalent in every genre.

Hand-Drawn Realism

My last category (and the smallest) is hand-drawn realism. There were only a few books that I felt fit into this criteria and it was those books that were designed for the express purpose of looking like a real book or a real piece of paper. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is one such example.

Alright, now that we’ve looked over the methodology and the categories, let’s take a look at what the data had to say. Over the course of 2019, there were only 101 unique books. I may have missed one or two, but most of Amazon’s Charts for the week were dominated by the large publishers or the well known, established authors. It was actually surprising to me that there were so few unique books. There were some books like I mentioned that rode the line between different categories, but I don’t think there were enough of them to skew the data in one direction or another. The data broke down like this:

1. Typography-based:                                      13

2. Minimalist:                                                   14

3. Hand-Drawn/Hand Painted Artwork:     16

4. Photography:                                                21

5. Digital Art:                                                    32

6. Hand-Drawn Realism:                                05 

Assessment

I think that the reason for the numbers is fairly simple: cost. If looked at from the perspective of how much each cover cost, it would look the exact same in from most to least, and more expensive to least expensive. The cheapest covers to produce are digital art. The most expensive is the hand-drawn realist. Minimalist and Typographic-based, and Hand-drawn/Painted Art are similar in price because of the time and creativity required by the artist. Finally, photographic and digital covers are the least expensive. I actually think that photographic images would be more popular if they could have been used in multiple genres. As it stands, it would look decidedly odd for Brandon Sanderson to start using photo-realistic covers for his books.

Which Kind of Cover is Best for Indie Writers?

So now that we have the data, what can we do with it? Well, the short answer is not much. I was hoping that the data would present a magic bullet for cover design and to be honest, I don’t think there is one. It looks to me that the percentage of covers has a direct relationship with the cost and genre of the cover. I think overall if an indie author were trying to decide on which kind of cover they wanted to use, they should go with a digital cover. It doesn’t look like it impacts sales much overall so long as its tastefully created and they’ll be saving themselves some extra cash. Splurging on a more expensive cover if you don’t know whether the sales will be there or not, might not be the best strategy. 

I hope this data could be useful to any future authors deciding to read my blog. Leave a comment below if there are any other topics you would like to see in the future. This one was kind of spur-of-the-moment poll on Twitter. I was actually hoping someone would vote for the the Deep Dive into the Mandalorian. Time to watch episode two!

-DWB