The point is... to sell the book/magazine.

At the back of the paperback edition of Robert Heinlein's Friday, there was a customer feedback questionnaire from the publisher. For the question "What first drew your attention to this book?", one of the choices you could make was "Liked the cover".

Indeed, my attention had first been drawn to the book because I liked the cover. And judging by the fact that it's still in use unchanged after a quarter-century, I wasn't the only one.

Oh, yeah, definitely! When I was hording the books I'd read, I always wished I had that cover rather than the first printing.

Robert A. Heinlein's SIDEBOOB.

Available now.

This one's cheesy, scary, and sort of erotic.

Book covers are interesting, I don't know how much these guys make on elaborate painting-illustrations like the ones he shows here but I can see that these clearly take time to create. When I illustrate bookcovers it has to be as fast as possible, because there's a set wage of very-little-money(tm) for each cover, and all rights to the illustration and layout time for the book is included in this price. If I spend more than 5 hours on the illustration, I make less than a burger-flipper. Course, sometimes I do that anyway because I'm having fun and want it to look just right, but then stuff might happen like that cover is rejected and thus I have to start over - with no difference in pay. In short, you learn to draw fast and do e x a c t l y what they say to avoid spending unpaid time on covers. The latest one I did is one of those do-overs that I didn't particularly like, but client liked it, so there ya go. I much preferred my first sketch (complete with the misspelled author's name, exactly as the client spelled it in their email with the brief) but it was deemed by marketing too angry/underdog looking. (didn't suit the book) so my re-do looks more like a pink-chick-lit thing.

We print the books, you do the covers - this penguin series is currently my favorite and I have a few of them. Of course it's just a clever marketing ploy that attracts atention to waning classics whilst simultaneously saving them the money of illustrations/photos & rights, but disregarding that doodling my own "Dracula" was fun.

Joe Beese: me too!