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After receiving many requests that she puts a “non-girly” cover on her book from her male readers, author Maureen Johnson decided to put out a challenge to her Twitter followers.
The “Coverflip” challenge invites people to imagine that the author of a well-known book is of the opposite gender and create an alternative book cover that is inspired by their “new” gender.
This challenge is based on the fact that there is a general idea that female authors should have girly book covers, which result in them getting cheesy, stereotypically feminine cover designs.
This matters because readers judge books by their covers and a “girly” cover usually suggest that the work is of a lower quality, regardless of its subject matter or actual content.
Receiving hundreds of responses within 24 hours, the challenge shows that female authors often get cheesy, girly covers while their male counterparts get more serious, manly ones—it also makes the point that such gendered constraints in book cover design disadvantage female authors and should be removed.
View more re-designed book covers from the Coverflip experiment below:
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[via Huffington Post]