Something that gets on my nerve, and Misty Massey touched upon above, is the way women are portrayed; so many book covers scream “artist (and probably buyer) seriously needs to get out more often and meet girls”!

otoh, not everyone shops for books in the same way.

But then, I’ve been extremely fortunate in my covers, over all.

Eliza, I suppose I’m coming around to the point of view you articulate, because you’re right: what works for one book or one set of books, may not work for another. A scene might be right for an epic fantasy series, but I have a darker, contemporary thing that I’m trying to sell right now, and I think that those covers, when the books are published, will need to be more impressionistic. Thanks for the comment.

Instead, I scored a gorgeous cover by an incredible artist, Shelly Wan. My editor and I emailed back and forth about scenes from the book we thought would translate well to a book cover, but Shelly finally went with an evocative (though less specific) painting.

No complaints from me!

I like characters, but ultimately, I’m more concerned with getting the genre and feel right at first glance. If that requires a pair of hands around a mask in blue lighting, great. If that requires a scene, then so be it. Make it pretty, and get the feel correct.

For the Crosspointe books, (and the cover conference for book III was today), I asked again for a cover element to tie them together, in this case a compass rose, which is key to the world. They put it on there, right behind the title, and this time they put on the cover a little banner that says “A novel of Crosspointe.” The covers of these books I also like a lot. They take some liberties, which is okay, but they capture the flavor of the books. The first cover isn’t really a specific scene, but the second one is. The third we talked about and we knew we wanted to stick with a single person on the cover. The third book has multiple pov characters, so we talked about which person would be the smart choice, and then also what scene might work. Because of certain Things That Happen, the scene has to be from early in the book. I know there will be liberties for the scene, since we only want a single person on the cover, but if they go with what we talked about, I think it will be really excellent. They also want to do something to convey a sense of magic on the cover and I’m not entirely sure how they’ll do that in this particular scene, but it should be fun.

I had one artist for the Path covers and a different one for the Crosspointe books. Both are fabulous and both bring something very cool to the work.

With regard to your question, a couple years ago I was at a convention in the town I was living where there were several authors who are signed with Baen Books as well as several of their editors and staff members. One of the events they did was a discussion of the art that they use for their books. The way they described the process was that for a lot of their new authors, they would use pre-made art that fit the theme of the books, but for their established authors (if those authors cared) they would go through a similar process where they would send the book or excerpts from the book to an artist and then the artist would return something representative of the theme of the book, or highlighting a specific scene. But there weren’t necessarily specific guidelines other than that the art have appropriate whitespace for placing the title and author’s name on top of the art.