Don’t judge a book by its cover… or do?

By Kath, Co-Host of book(ish)

I just watched a TikTok by Jack Edwards (lol I spend way too much time on there) in which he said that the author of Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus, hates the US cover of the book. 

I searched for tiiiiime to try and find this comment/review on Goodreads but I couldn’t actually find it anywhere, but here’s the TikTok video.

The US cover has a pink background with a cartoon drawing of a feminine woman on the front, and basically panders to the stereotypes that the book is trying to subvert, so it feels a bit, well messed up. 

And the other day I asked my boyfriend what he would think if he looked at my bookshelf, and he said ‘that you like romance’. This was a bit of a shock to me because, whilst I do really, really like romance (and read a looooot of romance novels) I like to think that I do read quite a range of books. I do, however, read a lot of books written by women… This is not a conscious choice, it just sort of, happens? We’ve talked about this before on the podcast, as we do try and actively talk about books by a diverse range of authors (which, yes, means men too!) but I’d say I do own and read predominantly books written by women. 

Anyway these two things got me thinking about books, design and selling to women. We all know about the pink tax… which can be described as “the tendency for products marketed specifically toward women to be more expensive than those marketed toward men” is a very real thing and proof that we still have a long way to go in the world of equality. 

I don’t know a fat lot about design, despite being surrounded by designers a lot of the time both at work and because my boyfriend himself is a designer (albeit not a book cover designer obviously). But I do find it truly WILD that an author writing quite blatantly about feminism, who even had input into the design of her cover, can still be provided with a book cover that simply implies the novel will be a good one for the gals, and implies the ‘chick-lit’ genre.

Are the publishers just suggesting that because it’s been written by a woman it will mostly be read by women? I don’t want to throw wild claims at the publishers or designers like that because I am sure the decision wasn’t conscious but I do think it’s probably part of a broader problem. 

I want to make it clear here that I truly, truly love chick-lit and will fight for that genre until I die. But it’s not fair to brand all novels like that just to sell to the gals. Surely a book cover should reflect the story and themes of the book? It’s the first impression someone has of a book, and will definitely have an impact on the sales.

I read Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez last year and it blew my mind. In this book Perez describes in detail how the world is designed for men, and as a consequence, how it is much harder and more dangerous to live as a woman in most areas of society. The seatbelt fact is often quoted in reference to this book, how car manufacturers test seatbelts on males so they are in fact, much less safe for the average woman. Wild. 

Anyway, I guess the publishing industry isn’t exempt from the misogyny in the rest of design and it’s something I’m going to actively be thinking about when browsing in bookshops from now on (my favourite thing to do lol).

And sure, it’s getting better. But we’re not there yet, the gender pay gap still exists and the ethnicity pay gap is even larger, a very clear indication in my mind that there’s a long way to go.