A friend called me up the other day and told me about this amazing sale. A book warehouse was selling everything, just $10 for one bag of books. And you brought the bag, any size.

Well, I had a rolling cart. I could fit a lot of books in that thing. Maybe even a couple hundred. Didn’t matter, she said. Ten bucks.

The warehouse was actually three buildings FILLED with shelves of books. The shelves were pretty close together, too.

Enough that I sometimes had to squeeze through to fit. 

Books upon books, stretching out as far as you could see. All of them mixed together in no logical order.

We were hunting for hours to find any that we might like.

Many of them were romances. A lot of mystery. It took me hours to find some sci-fi and fantasy, or paranormal. But I eventually came away with a nice stack of books. I grabbed some Nora Roberts, who seemed to be one of the most prolific authors there, and a few Dean Koontz, and then a bunch of random books with interesting covers.

And you know what I discovered while crawling through those three buildings with thousands and thousands of books laid out before me? Mind you, I could throw as many as I wanted in my cart, and price wasn’t really an option….

Book covers are boring.

Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, and more… all of them.. boring covers.

You have the authors name in HUGE letters, a boring picture, and not much else. Most of them just labeled them as “fiction” so I couldn’t even get a read on what kind of fiction it was. It was frustrating… three warehouses worth of books and not much time to pic out a book, and this is what I had to choose from.

I did manage to find a lot of books with good covers… but it was hard to find them. And a lot of them were meant for younger children.

I notice that Sci-fi and Fantasy are more likely to have expressive covers. Romance is likely to have two people kissing, or something like that. Paranormal will often have an expressive cover.

This is why I work so hard on my own covers. I want someone to be able to look at a glance, and get an idea of what’s inside the book. So far I think I’ve done alright… You be the judge.