Harry Connolly is interesting about cover art, sub-genres, and pinning down what is "real" literature.
He posts three covers, one of which is to The Postman Always Rings Twice, which sits on literature lists, as the other two examples very plainly aren't. I've always thought of that novel as unexamined male gaze trash, tightly written trash, but
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I actually like the cover of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" as well. The art deco typography is interesting, though I don't see much difference between "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and forgotten pulp novels from the same era. I've never liked that novel, though that's largely due to the fact that I share a first name with the femme fatale character, her lover shares a first name with a classmate of mine and neither of us ever got to live it down after someone in my highschool class watched the early 1980s film adaption on TV.
The thing about cover art is that it's determined by genre, by trends (i.e. all the black and white kissing couples or hairless bare-chested youths on certain indie romance covers) and also by national tastes. For example, a good crime fiction or thriller cover in Germany looks completely different from what is considered a good crime fiction or thriller cover in the US. US and UK covers for the same books regularly look different.
Cora
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Sometimes it's also marketing. The German "A Song of Ice and Fire" covers look uncannily like the covers for Ken Follett's popular historical novels "The Pillars of the Earth" and whatever the sequel was called. I guess they believe that both will appeal to similar readers.
Some of it is also simply cultural differences. For example, I tend to find a lot of American covers considered good or appropriate for their genre incredibly ugly and buy the British edition whenever possible, because the covers are closer to my tastes.
Cora
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I also think that both marketing folks at publishing companies as well as the buyers of the big bookstore chains often operate on the basis of old data. Hence the persistence of horrid clinch covers on romance novel, even though every romance reader I ever met hates those covers.
Indie writers aren't much better. If anything, some of them are even more conservative with regard to cover choices than publishers ever were.
Cora
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