They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but the fact is we often do. As an author, I’m at the mercy of the designers who give the book its definitive look. Despite the title of this post, I just wanted to celebrate a handful of my favourite covers.

The first is the most recent – The Global Warming Survival Kit:
(See details at Amazon) – I just love the look of this. In a recent BBC interview the presenter described the cover as scary, but I thought it was rather friendly (shows what I know).

The second was for a book called Studying Creatively:
(See details at Amazon)

I love the illustration at the bottom, demonstrating that this involves out of the box thinking. Here it is a bit bigger so you get the impact:

Yellows and reds must be in this season.

The last one is just a delight. It’s a book I wrote in my business book days on customer service, called Capturing Customers’ Hearts. The cover is from the Spanish edition, and I just love the literalness of an illustration where there’s been a touch of heart extraction:
(See details at Amazon)
It’s not entirely obvious in the little photo, but there’s a big scar down the middle of the chest and my name is in a shiny heart. Wonderful.

... I just realized the title could be a bit misleading. I’m not suggesting any of these are bad or ugly. Like some of the less pleasing covers I have had, it seemed a good idea at the time.