Research question: how do front book covers introduce the narrative of the book and influence the reader’s expectations of the book?
Entries:
Yampbell, Cat. "Judging A Book By Its Cover: Publishing Trends In Young Adult Literature." The Lion And The Unicorn, vol. 29, no. 3, 2005, pp. 348-372. Johns Hopkins University Press, doi:10.1353/uni.2005.0049.
In this article Yampbell analyses the importance of appealing and eye-catching book covers for Young Adult novels. Her particular interest lies is in the ways publishers reach for a young teenager audience and how they engender their desire to purchase a book by manipulating and altering the packaging of the text, that is, a cover. In a more broad discussion on why book covers are an integral part of the text, she argues that they are “the foremost aspect of the book” and “regardless of the quality of the literature, its cover often determines a book’s success”. In relation to the visual appeal of the book covers, she notes that unified covers, those ones released by the same illustrator and rendered in the same style, help to sell the book since devoted readers recongise their favorite author via cover art. She coins a term “grabability”, that is, a book’s physical and aesthetical qualities that
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This book’s particular usefulness for the current research is in its wide range of topics related to the book’s paratexts in general and book covers and various “verbal, numerical, iconographic” items that appear on the cover in particular. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation Genette almost exclusively focuses on the 19th and 20th century French fiction to discuss the paratext’s illocutionary force: how a book meant to be interpreted, what information and intent it conveys; also important is the discussion on the prospective addressee of the