We’ve all heard the phrase "Don’t judge a book by its cover." However, it’s unrealistic to act like the images we're presented with don’t influence the way we buy and think about books in general, particularly novels written by women versus those written by men. Especially with the young adult genre, female works are often regarded as "fluff," "beach reads" and "chick lit." The implication of all these labels being that they aren’t meant to be thought about complexly but rather viewed as sources of shallow entertainment compared with the heavy-hitting, heroic issues in male-written stories. These judgments rarely come from the quality of the writing itself but rather how the book is designed and aimed to attract certain demographics of readers.
Novels written by men feature covers ranging from pure text to abstract art to significant symbols/images from the book itself: for example, a picture of a sword across the front of George R.R. Martin’s "Game of Thrones" or the drawing of the iconic carousel from "The Catcher in the Rye."
Books with female authors and main characters will often feature a beautiful young woman gazing wistfully off the side of the page or offering a suggestive smirk to the reader. Or perhaps the focus will be just a part of her body: hands, lips, torso, etc., even if this image has no relation at all to the book’s plot.
The color scheme will almost always feature more pastels, baby-blues, pinks and purples, while men’s work is marketed more with intense primary shades or in serious black and white.
The prettier, more embellished packaging implies that the book by the woman will tackle “lighter issues” and that the story itself won’t offer as challenging of an experience as one written by a male author.
These trends have created a sharp divide in the way we buy and think about books in general. “Real literature” is associated with topics like war and male narratives while female characters are confined to the space of love interests or femme fatales.
Even within the sphere of classics, someone like Hemmingway and his readers are culturally regarded as appreciators of nature and the strong, simple things in life, while Jane Austen’s social impact is reduced to "romance novels that are only interesting for girls looking for their own Mr. Darcy."
The bias of the book industry goes even deeper, with authors like the wildly talented and successful J.K. Rowling being told by her publisher to only print her first initials rather than her full name on the cover of the "Harry Potter" series because it might impact sales among young male readers.
Back in 2013, Maureen Johnson, the popular author of young adult books like "13 Little Blue Envelopes" and "The Shades of London" series, brought attention to the issue by starting a campaign called Coverflip.
After receiving an email from a teenage boy that said he wished her books “had non-girly covers” so he could read them, Johnson took to Twitter and asked her followers to take the covers of well-known novels and re-imagine their designs as if they were being marketed specifically toward male or female readers. Responses to the author’s request were overwhelming, with hundreds of redesigned covers pouring in within just a few hours.
Literary classics like "Lord of the Flies" were represented with much softer colors and "cutesy imagery" of a tiny stuffed pigs while traditionally masculine novels like Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" were given the “chick lit” treatment through changing it’s dark, abstract cover to one of a smiling teenage girl sticking her head out a van window.
While it may at first seem amusing, the project highlighted our culture’s tendency to view works about women and created by women as less serious and of lower quality than those targeted toward men. Not only does this cause women to associate their gender and signs of "femininity" with something shameful, but it also harms male readers as well. Othering an entire category of literature as "chick lit" and placing it in a separate section makes boys feel that they aren’t allowed to read books written by or about women without fear of being mocked.
One solution to this issue is to promote more gender-neutral covers for both male and female-written books of all genres. A book like John Green’s "The Fault in Our Stars" managed to sell extremely well with a colorful, unique design that didn’t pander to any associations with gender stereotypes. If more books written by women were given this same treatment then it would go a long way in reducing the stigma around reading a "girly book" in public.
Another, more long-term issue to tackle is to work on the way we view women’s lives and interests in general, giving them the same weight and attention as those of men in order to eliminate the idea of the male story as the default and confining half the population to a single section of the bookstore.
