Links of the week September 16 2024 (38)

If you perused a bookstore's new fiction section anytime between 2019 and 2023, you probably saw a bunch of books festooned by indistinct, pastely swatches of color. A bunch of smart, incisive things have been written about the color blob trend over the course of its moment as the book cover trend du too many jours, and the template was so ubiquitously adhered to that you didn't even have to have read You Exist Too Much or The Vanishing Half to have understood its deal. Book cover design, like any other field of design, moves in waves. While the color blob was preceded by the two-dimensional color block meta and the headless woman fad, there are some particularities to note. Blobwave's rise was contemporaneous with that of algorithmic book-buying, both on Amazon and on social media, and as Print noted three years ago, color blob design represented a "'safe' route disproportionately taken in service of women of color and debut authors."

But this is not a story about the blob. This is about what comes next, a question to which I propose the following answer: old-timey animals.

Some critics would say that the author profile is a shoddy replacement for actual book criticism and I would agree with them. Over the past decade or so we've seen space for book coverage at general media outlets decline overall, and straight reviews, unless they're absolutely vicious takedowns, notoriously don't tend to generate much traffic.

At first, books sections shunned the straight review in favor of more clickable fare, but now even the more camera-ready author profile is on the chopping block. I fear the day when newsy bullet points summarizing celebrity memoirs are the only book coverage available to the average newspaper or magazine reader.