I love attending author events. I get swag, I hear about new books, and I get to smell authors. Well maybe not smell them but I get to breathe the same air they do. Its all pretty exciting for any book nerd. Even though I would love to say I remember every book, and can name every author I've read the fact remains I can't. I'm actually better at remembering book covers than author names. Well, at a recent author event I saw an author promoting her books and I rushed over to her table. I was really confident that I read her book See, I thought I was meeting Keary Taylor, author of "What I didn't Say", a book I really enjoyed reading last year. In my excitement, I greeted the author like I was seeing an old friend. I'm not sure about anyone else but I tend to think of characters in books I really enjoyed as my friends. Well as I started talking to the author at the this massive book event I realized my mistake. I wasn't meeting Keary Taylor and I was in an awkward predicament. Here is an author who thinks I'm really excited to meet her but I just realized I never read any one of her books. I got duped with the reuse of a stock cover image that plenty of authors use to save on cost.
 | I understand it can cost a lot of money for authors to self publish a book. They have to pay for all the upfront cost to publish their own books like editors, websites, proofreaders, and much more. Therefore using a low cost or free image for their own book covers is very cost effective. Now as a reader who browses the kindle store and who is looking for their next read. I will skip over a book I already think I read. Why buy the same book twice? Even though the content of the book is entirely different but as I'm browsing the kindle store I'm not having those in-depth thoughts. I'm just looking for my next read. Anyways, back at the author event, I made my embarrassing exit making promises to read more of the author other books and made a point to look up this cover. |
Pretty popular cover, right? My google image search turn up about 600 searches. I'm not going to lie. The picture is really nice. It grabbed my attention the first time and I read a book because of it but I doubt I'll read any of these other books because of the similar covers. I wish I could say it doesn't matter but I feel differently about it. I do wonder what if I hated "What I Didn't Say." and then associated that cover with a negative feeling. I guess that is a risk authors have to take when using free or low cost stock images. Am I the only one who feels this way when you see the same cover being used over & over again? I really hope not.
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