Maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—but if you want to judge a book’s cover, you’re in good company! There are a number of blogs dedicated to discussing book cover design. One with a lot of fans is Joseph Sullivan’s The Book Design Review, which he’s been publishing since 2005. Sullivan updates frequently, writing brief, entertaining posts about the latest noteworthy book covers. He tries to track down the name of the designer for each cover he mentions, which I think is great, because the designer is often not credited anywhere in the book.

Another good book-design blog is FaceOut Books, the blog of the Oregon firm DesignWorks Group. The DesignWorks folks choose a book cover they admire and ask the designer to talk about the process of creating it. And the designers generously do so—often including images of sketches, source materials, and rejected ideas. FaceOut is updated every Monday, and the entries are usually quite detailed. I love that DesignWorks is putting energy into such a cooperative approach instead of being snarky and competitive.

Here are a few more good sites about book covers:

• Readerville Journal’s regular feature Most Coveted Covers
• The Book Cover Archive Blog
• Covers
• Caustic Cover Critic