After seeing this idea up on Jaime's blog from The Broke and Bookish's Top Ten Tuesday, I had to join in.

"Throne of the Crescent Moon" by Saladin Ahmed

Just look at that cover by one of my favorite artists, Jason Chan. It's beautiful.  Such a variety of awesome looking characters.

'Mockingbird' by Chuck Wendig

Loved the Blackbird cover, and love this one as well. Both remind me pleasantly of Death from The Sandman. I still need to read these.

"Shadow and Bone" by Leigh Bardugo

Beautiful, Russian-inspired cover art.

'The Fault In Our Stars' by John Green

Deceptively simple, but instantly recognisable. Click the link above to read a review.

"Article 5" by Kristen Simmons

An all-round wonderful sci-fi YA cover.

'Tempest' by Julie Cross

There's something wonderfully tense and dramatic about this scene. I adore the colour of the sky as well, and the slight "Hush, Hush" style to the poses.

'The Statistical Probability of Love At First Sight" by Jennifer E. Smith  

Super-cute, love the restricted colour scheme and how neatly they worked in such a long title.

"Wonder" by R.J. Palacio 

This is the story of a boy with an abnormal face. What a tricky book to think up a cover for, but this simple image really blows the concept out of the water.

"What's Left Of Me" Kat Zhang

This is a brilliantly illustration - it captures the title perfectly.

"Thief's Covenant" by Ari Marmell

To finish things off, another Jason Chan - and this time it's the story of Widdershins, a young thief. This is another cover which uses a restricted set of colours to beautiful effect, as well as negative space. I really like how confident and intelligent the young thief looks.

A few runner-ups that didn't make the cut:

"Cinder" by  Marissa Meyer. The cover sums up the story perfectly: Cinderella, with cyborgs.

"The Way We Fall" by Megan Crewe. The bright, bold yellow really grabs me here -- and I'm a sucker for image-inside-text covers like the original Delirium cover.

"A Million Suns" by Beth Revis. "Across the Universe" had a fantastic cover, and it's sequel is just as artistically well-off. This spells out the sci-fi and romance clearly, and the covers fit well with the previous book's cover.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com

I was sorting out the images on my Macbook and I came across this...

This is the original cover design I was sent for the slipcover of the Greek "Dragon Tamers" hardcover. Looks good, right?

If you're not a gamer, reader or designer then yes - it's shiny. Attention grabbing. Looks good.

...But there's something not quite right. Apart from the strange character in the bottom who might be the publisher's mascot, the book's protagonist is a black-haired girl. So immediately, some mental alarm bells are ringing about this cover designer's attention to detail.

Wait, haven't I seen that guy before...?

Final Fantasy E.Maree?

That's the cover art for Final Fantasy X, voted by Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu to be the greatest video game of all time and fifth in IGN's "Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time". Selling 6.6 million units worldwide, it's a pretty big deal - the Final Fantasy series is one of the best selling video game franchises.

I pointed out the mistake to the publishers and it was redone, though I never did get an explanation as to how that happened.

The final Greek cover.

This amusing event shows that book cover designers are far too often really bad. There are plenty of great ones who can sum up a book in a simple image, and there are a lot of famous, stunning covers - but there are also thousands of 'designers' who think it's acceptable to Google Image Search the keywords that are vaguely related to the work and badly edit it all together with a Photoshopped font on top.

It isn't okay. Google Image Search images are almost all still under copyright, and sticking them all together and selling it is just profiting easily of other people's work. There are people who work hard to create these works - and it's not usually well-known video games that get ripped off, it's independent artists who don't have a chance at taking legal action when their work is stolen for commercial use.

Because of how difficult it is to be sure photo-based covers, especially foreign ones, come from open sources the illustrated covers for my work tend to be my favorites. The amount of work that goes into the airbrush-painted cover for UK Dragon Tamers 2, digitally painted Dutch DT1 and traditionally painted somewhere-Nordic-maybe-Swedish DT1 all stand above the rest for the sheer effort taken. Done well they can create a unique impression of a story's cast.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of great covers made using photographs - most good covers are these days. Two of my recent favourite designs "Fallen" and "Hush, Hush" both use photographs to stunning effects.

In the end, though, there's always people trying to take shortcuts and making things unfair for everything.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com