Recently, Dean Casalena and Nate Gagnon have launched a fun online game Judgey that lets visitors rate the books only by judging their covers.
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As much as 300,000 visitors played the game within a week. Each player is asked to vote for ten books, so the total number of ratings was 3 million.
Having this hard data at hand, the founders of Judgey have decided to share the results in a blog post as well as an infographic.
Obviously, this is not a scientific study, but it shows surprising results, giving enough reasons to think about the state of book cover art.
The chart shows 100 books. Some of them are well known (the books and their covers), but the vast majority are the titles users of Judgey probably have seen for the first time.
Each book – or I should rather say this time “book cover” – is accompanied by a simple graph showing the ratings from Judgey players.
There are two bars on every graph:
- the gray bar shows the average cover rating – the rating based on the cover,
- the red one shows the average book rating – the rating the book received on book recommendation site Goodreads.
Take a closer look at the infographic, open it in a full view, because the findings are very interesting.
It turns out that we undervalue the book if we have to make an opinion after seeing its cover. Only a few books out of 100 have better cover ratings than Goodreads ratings.
On average, the cover ratings are 3 or less. Is that something book cover designers should start worrying about?
What happens when we see a book cover we very well know? Is the cover rating at the same level as the book rating? The answer is: lower, sometimes much lower.
Cover rating is close to book rating only in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (4.0 vs. 4.2 respectively). Cover ratings for Hunger Games, 11/22/63, or Twilight are surprisingly worse.
Come and play on Judgey. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and this entertaining tool may help you realize why. Books deserve more attention than a quick look at their covers.
Click or tap the infographic to enlarge it.
More infographics to check out:
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