prompt: bow, title: undercover bosses in misc. flash fiction

You can’t judge a book by its cover, they say, whoever the hell “they” are. And far as aphorisms go, it’s mostly true, at least literally so. A book’s cover isn’t made to reflect its contents, rather to evoke a confluence of marketing trends and the aesthetic expectations of sub-genres. Working in libraries, one becomes acutely aware of what publishing houses believe sells.

“Cozy mysteries”, as example, gentle crimes solved by some kindly grandma in an armchair or a plucky young graduate who returned home to take over her aunt’s yarnshop or bakery, those will have a fresh croissant on the cover, maybe a half-finished crochet. An adorable kitten with a silk bow for a collar? It won’t say a whit of what’s inside, the axiom’s correct to that extent, rather it says everything about who their publishing-executives believe are buying their paper products.

Worse, this current wave of hipster romances, whimsical renderings of “will-they or won’t-they but-they-definitely-will” couples involved in saccharine meet-cutes, in unthreatening pastel and the same three recurring recycled comic-strip fonts, as if they’d all escaped from the same 1988 Lisa Frank inflected Trapper Keeper. The child targets of the early 21st century Y.A. boom grew up but the book-mills decided to just continue the generation’s particular design preferences into infinity instead of trusting them to grow out of their adolescent stylings. Progress has been made insofar as now they aren’t always a white-anglo-saxon-protestant woman and man, but whether the romance is between two lesbian wizards or occurs amidst loaves at a Jewish challah bakery, all the exact same design language. You can hardly tell them apart. But, of course, that’s the point.

Still, what kills me the most are the author’s photos inside of their back sleeves. They all judge perfectly how the writers hope to be perceived. Danielle Steele, lounging in enough jewelry to make the Queen of Sheba blush. The military-fiction and spy writers, maybe J.D. Vance in the leather pilot’s jacket and crisp blue jeans, whoever ghost-writes for Tom Clancy this week and his squinting death-glare. Those unhinged middle-distance stares of horror scribes desperate to seem scarier than their tales, even though they’re softer than candy floss. The thirty-something Young Adult hacks, airbrushed to hell-and-back, hoping they can pass for the southern side of twenty-seven where The Kids can still identify with them. Younger or richer, deeper or crazier, all of them straining to look like anything other than someone who just spent nine months in a dark room, trying to make sense of one-hundred-thousand spent word-bullets.

You cannot judge a book by its cover, that is entirely true, but everything else should be up for judgement’s grabs. It may be the great American novel but your marketing materials still look like a bubblegum factory barfed up all over them. It may be the truest song of your soul but you’re still trying too hard to look like a genius. Judge the covers themselves and judge them harshly.

God knows they deserve it.