Trends in cover design

[ameliasmith]

I don't usually open The Book Designer's emails any more, but I do still look at the weekly roundup post. One of this week's was a collection of book covers from 2016 -- always fun!
 www.casualoptimist.com/blog/2016/11/27/notable-book-covers-of-2016/ 

What I noticed was that there are a lot of muted colors, grayscale, and even just black-and-white covers compared to past years. Now, these are mostly literary fiction and non-fiction titles, which seem to be more experimental than pulp/genre fiction these days, but I wonder how much these literary fiction trends and experiments will spill over into book design for other genres. 

[Miss Terri Novelle]

I sure hope not because very few of those black and white covers would induce me to purchase. The only one I'd pick from the bunch is the Annie Proulx and not because of the cover, but because I enjoy her work a great deal.

[djmills]

I stopped looking at the Book Designer covers listed each month with comments because I mostly disagree with every comment. And I am tired of seeing a head shot covering the whole image. It does not tell me the genre.

I also stopped reading any of the articles, except for the roundup links. This past two months I only clicked on one or two links to do with marketing but nothing new in either post. :-)

Maybe it is "information overload".

I was thinking of removing that link in my FeedReader along with a few others, but decided to leave it listed for a while, in case of new publishing information. :-)

[ameliasmith]

I think that I've either absorbed all of Joel Friedlander's basics or he's just started trying to sell stuff now, rather than share information. Sometimes his weekly round-ups have an interesting link that I haven't seen yet, though.

Information overload is also a problem.

[whdean]

I see lot of Victorian elements. Hey Donovan, where's that Sunshine Superman cover of yours?

[Rinelle Grey]

Very artsy and literary. Some of them had very bad typography (dark letters going over a dark background element) that were total no-no's. Several of them would have been hard to read in thumbnails. I really can't see any of this coming across to genre fiction.