it seems a bit ironic to me that authors can freely snark covers and then wonder why readers think it's okay to snark books. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but I think there's a bit of a double standard at work here
I think it depends on the kind of snarking that's done of the cover. Sometimes there are really obvious problems with the cover e.g. a heroine with three arms. There are also well-known problems with the models depicted on covers not matching the characters as they're described in the novels. Then there are more subjective, but still what I'd think of as fair comments about whether it looks as though the heroine's neck is broken, whether it really makes sense to depict the half-naked hero and heroine getting passionate outside in the snow/ on the edge of a cliff/ in a boat that looks as though it's about to capsize. That's not so very different from a reviewer pointing out plot inconsistencies.
Some cover snarks maybe do go beyond that, and maybe they stray into personal comments about the artist, in which case maybe people should start thinking about the artist's feelings and refrain.
Anyway, I think it's a fair point to raise the issue of cover snarks, but it's not an all or nothing issue. Just as people might accept fair, rigorous, even highly critical but non-personalised reviews based on a reading of a significant proportion of the text/all of the text, they might consider it fair to snark covers in some ways but not in others.
Another group of people who haven't been mentioned in all this are the cover models. I'm not particularly keen on snark which seems to be critiquing the bodies of cover models. That's partly because I think that in contemporary society there's constant pressure on people to have particular shapes/sizes/colours/ages of body but also because cover models have feelings too, and personally, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have sometimes found it rather upsetting when what's being snarked is a physical feature which I share with the cover model in question.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-08 07:00 pm (UTC)I think it depends on the kind of snarking that's done of the cover. Sometimes there are really obvious problems with the cover e.g. a heroine with three arms. There are also well-known problems with the models depicted on covers not matching the characters as they're described in the novels. Then there are more subjective, but still what I'd think of as fair comments about whether it looks as though the heroine's neck is broken, whether it really makes sense to depict the half-naked hero and heroine getting passionate outside in the snow/ on the edge of a cliff/ in a boat that looks as though it's about to capsize. That's not so very different from a reviewer pointing out plot inconsistencies.
Some cover snarks maybe do go beyond that, and maybe they stray into personal comments about the artist, in which case maybe people should start thinking about the artist's feelings and refrain.
Anyway, I think it's a fair point to raise the issue of cover snarks, but it's not an all or nothing issue. Just as people might accept fair, rigorous, even highly critical but non-personalised reviews based on a reading of a significant proportion of the text/all of the text, they might consider it fair to snark covers in some ways but not in others.
Another group of people who haven't been mentioned in all this are the cover models. I'm not particularly keen on snark which seems to be critiquing the bodies of cover models. That's partly because I think that in contemporary society there's constant pressure on people to have particular shapes/sizes/colours/ages of body but also because cover models have feelings too, and personally, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have sometimes found it rather upsetting when what's being snarked is a physical feature which I share with the cover model in question.