Cover deja vu: The Dangers of Stock Photography
Go into any bookstore and you’ll see photos on covers everywhere. I’m not sure whether publishers think photography sells books better or they’re just too cheap to pay an artist, but it seems to be a growing trend in cover design.
Most of the time, I don’t have a problem with it. I mean, I don’t want to see artwork on covers disappear, but variety is good.
The thing is, when a publisher buys a photo, they don’t get exclusive rights to it unless they commission the photo shoot themselves (which is rare) - meaning anyone can come along and pay to use the same image, including other cover designers.
That isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it does create a feeling of déjà vu when you come across one of these “repeats” - it’s almost like glimpsing a character from some past book come to haunt the pages of your new one. It’s also interesting to see how different the covers came out when their designers used the same starting point.