What's the next cover trend?

curious if anyone has Noticed Anything

Another interactive question post! (Paid subscribers can talk about batching queries to agents on Tuesday’s post.)

People who read a lot tend to notice book cover trends. Sometimes it’s something as obvious as the color-blobs of the late 2010’s, or the current trend of sprayed edges. Sometimes it’s more subtle, like certain color schemes, or I’ve certainly noticed many covers with fine-art paintings that seem altered or added-to.

I was thinking about this when looking ahead to my own list, for 2025:

So much beautiful pink, across all genders!

These are all such different covers, for such different books, and from very different publishers: Bloomsbury, William Morrow, Crown, Ballantine, Algonquin, Catapult. What does it mean that they all finalized a pink-hued cover? Does it mean anything?

The cover selection process is one of the most mysterious of the publication process, and can often be the most fraught. (I drafted a post months ago commenting on Tajja Isen’s excellent essay in The Walrus about the racism of the book cover design process, but realized I really had nothing to add.)

There are obvious copycats when something specifically works well (those sprayed edges.) But what’s in the air that multiple departments fairly independent or completely siloed from one another come upon the same concept as something they think will draw readers to buy a book?

I also found this comment in a British GQ interview with Kishan Rajani, who designed Faber’s cover of Intermezzo, interesting:

Are large titles also needed so covers can work effectively on a phone screen?

KR: We’re designing in an age where things have to look great on a bookshelf as well as on someone's phone – if they’re searching through Amazon, these titles have to be able to be read clearly on a tiny thumbnail. [It’s] a topic of discussion that might come up in our cover meetings – the sales team might be like, “Our primary mode of selling this is going to be online, so we need the title to shout out,” or there’ll be like, “It’s going to be mainly sold through Waterstones, so we want the physical copy to be [a] beautiful gift object.”

(Also an interesting comment on how BookTok affects cover design now, in the interview.)

Has anyone noticed, or have any suspicions about, the cover design trends for 2025?

Currently reading: Fog & Car by Eugene Lim.