Book cover color?

Because it seems that all knowledge is contained in fandom my friendslist: I remember from some time ago that David Cherry once had to repaint a book cover from green to blue because he was told that green covers didn't sell as well. So I've always had it in my head that this is the case - is this true, if it was true then, is it still true now? Does anyone out there know? Bueller? Bueller?

I've poked around Google a bit but can't come up with any keywords that get me results that give info on what elements of a book cover design make a book sell and what don't - I just end up with a bunch of self-publishing sites and graphic art studios that want me to pay them a bunch of money to design a book cover.

Chalk this up to one of those things that occur to me at random and then I start obsessing over for no reason.

Mangatalk: Covers

Stemming from this afternoon's discussion of cover colors, I got the desire to see if I could see any difference in the top-selling manga and less well selling manga. I couldn't find any numbers for a full year anywhere, but the admin of Love Manga loves to crunch numbers and posts a Top 50 list every month. So these ratings swiped from his Top 50 Manga for November 2005.

I swiped the images from Amazon.com, and since Amazon was running slow for me, instead of comparing the top 10 versus the bottom 10 in this list, I'm just doing the top 5.

Caveats: we all know the cover isn't the only thing that causes book sales (word of mouth is actually the #1 selling point), so you don't need to tell me that the cover is only part of that and there's all these other aspects that go into it. (Anyone posting to tell me that gets directed up to this sentence. :D) Also, looking at one month's sales don't really tell us much - I'd need to look at the sales month-by-month for an entire year or more, and frankly you'd probably need to pay me to do that. XD So we can't draw any real conclusions from this, but it might provide something to think about. Or it might not. Let's see, shall we?

( On to the cover images )

 

Mangatalk: Covers, part 2

A quick-and-dirty experiment on a couple of covers from the previous post. You'll want to read that post first for this to make sense.

( On to the pics )

Voice Post: You mean I have to transcribe my OWN post? You ppl suck!

Addendum to the project...

...that I mentioned back here. I think I've figured out a sort of good overall things-happening-behind-the-scenes, which explains why stuff is happening to the protags that they don't know, and why creatures from the heavens or whatnot would be interested in them. Not that I'm telling you because I do know that if I tell too much, the story vanishes; I'm just making a note here to remind myself.

As a vaguely-related aside, if your world has the typical sort of reincarnation where what you're born as depends on your merit/karma from the previous life, what would be a sort of animal that would be a good stop right before being born as a human, but which is still vaguely embarrassing to be born as? Maybe a duck. Ducks are always funny. It just sounds like a good setup for a joke. :D

I'm rambling way more than usual. I need to go the hell to bed.