Having recently met with my cover artist to discuss the cover for my next work, which should be released sometime this month (follow me on Amazon for e-mail notifications of new releases), I wanted to write a post on the topic of cover art.
A few months ago, I ran across an interesting article in which the author collected the cover art of bestsellers throughout recent years (2000-2012) and compared them side by side. He found a number of interesting trends, such as white covers were popular in the beginning of this time period, then in 2008 black covers flooded the charts (mostly comprised of the hugely popular Twilight series). At the end of this span, he observed that overall the trend in cover art has seemed to move towards “bright saturated hues.”
This got me thinking of the trends that I have noticed in science-fiction and fantasy covers, specifically, what appears to be a move away from the grandiose, scene-setting covers of old and towards simpler, more abstract covers which focus on the title and author text.