Cover Envy

So as an aspiring published author I often (probably way too often) spend time day dreaming about what my novel cover will look like. I comb the books stores looking for the latest trends and generally love judging books by their covers, especially now that YA books get such wonderful covers!

So this is going to be a reoccurring post on my blog and for the first one ever, I'd like to start out with a bang and do the top 5 book series covers I love together! So without further adieu and in no particular order, here we go!

1. Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series- All the covers look great on their own but together, they are a sight to behold! Each cover evokes this dark mood that emanates in Marr's novels. The covers get better with age! My favorite has to be the last Darkest Mercy because the colors so incredibly vivid and beautiful.

2. Carrie Ryan's Forest of Teeth and Hands Series- It's a bit of a shocker to me that these books are making the list because I was not wild about the first cover. I got a shock when I saw the paperback cover for The Forest of Hands and Teeth. The model looks mysterious, the tree branches look like they are trapping her in and the sepia color tone really sets up good mood. The Dead-Tossed Waves hardback cover didn't disappoint either!  

3. Maggie Stiefvater's Wolves of Mercy Falls series- These covers are timeless. I walked into the bookstore and was sucker punch by Shiver staring back at me on the bookshelf. Again, these covers do an awesome job for the setting the mood for the stories. I love follow the vines on the covers to see what other shapes they morph into and the splashes of blood are just genius! Plus, with the different colors, they look great as a set.

 

4. Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush Hush series- These covers have me hooked. Both do such a great job of evoking  the feeling of (at least the first) novel. I love the feathers swirling down on the first cover and the position the male model is in. He looks like he is in so much pain. The second cover is really great because one of my strongest memories of the first novel is about the fog always floating around her house and Crescendo evokes that for me.

5. Carrie Jones's Need Series- I've always dug dark covers. I really like how these covers utilize black, white and grey by adding a pop of color so that it really stands out. As with the Wicked Lovely series above, each cover gets better with time. I saw the third cover somewhere pretty recently and if it stays the same, it will be even better than the other two!

There were a lot of honorable mentions that didn't make it on to my top 5 that I want to throw out like The Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray, The Twilight Sage by Stephanie Meyer, the Harry Potter series by J.K Rowling, The Books of Pellinor by Alison Croggan and L.A. Candy novels by Lauren Conrad to name a few. 

The most recent cover I saw that gave me bad cover envy is Carrie (apparently I have a thing for Carrie covers) Harris. The novel is called Bad Taste in Boys and I first caught the cover on her agent's website, Kate Schafer. Here it is:

There is a little blurb (that I got from http://ktliterary.com/2010/07/another-fabulous-cover/) about the book:

Someone’s been a very bad zombie.

Super-smartie Kate Grable gets to play doctor, helping out her high school football team. Not only will the experience look good on her college apps, she gets to be thisclose to her quarterback crush, Aaron. Then something disturbing happens. Kate finds out that the coach has given the team steroids. Except . . . the vials she finds don’t exactly contain steroids. Whatever’s in them is turning hot gridiron hunks into mindless, flesh-eating . . . zombies.


Unless she finds an antidote, no one is safe. Not Aaron, not Kate’s brother, not her best friend . . . not even Kate . . .


It’s scary. It’s twisted. It’s sick. It’s high school.

Because of the awesome cover and the blurb, this is a novel I'm really looking forward to!