Last month, I posted a video online that changed my understanding of the hoary old adage, "Don’t judge a book by its cover".

For context, I’m a bookseller, but in the evenings I moonlight as a comedian. I’ve been doing stand-up for a decade now, the latter half of which I’ve been dicing up footage of my most polished jokes and flinging them at the social media algorithm with the weary apprehension of someone slotting his priceless coin collection into a pub fruit-machine.

Traditionally, I’ve tried to keep the comedy and bookselling halves of my lives separate. But in March, weary of sacrificing my beloved joke children on the TikTok altar, I broke the habit, uploading a video in which I listed, somewhat sassily, which book-cover trends I considered overused.

A month on, that video has been seen more than 200,000 times. While that’s fairly minor in the grander scheme of social media virality, compared with my other work, it’s unimaginable.

Nothing I have ever made in my life has received as much engagement. Not only views, but comment after comment, from people agreeing, disagreeing, suggesting their own book-design pet peeves, often in language considerably spicier than my own. People love to judge book covers. They burn for it.

So, I think it’s fair to say, with the freedom from etiquette that the internet affords, most people aren’t following that age-old advice. But why is that?

Well, for starters, it’s worth considering that we’re living in a world where covers don’t purely exist to sell the contents of their books. I see customers regularly buy titles because they consider them an art object in themselves. Members of Generation Rent, deprived of the ownership of their living quarters, often use their book purchases to decorate their homes. Similarly, if you can’t afford artwork, vehicles, a home or fancy clothes, books are a cheaper way of displaying taste, in person and online. As pieces of art, they’re mobile and have an inbuilt social significance. Books can be your new wallpaper or can be easily photographed on a café table next to a matcha latte and a pastry the size of your head.

Partly though, I think it also comes from a weariness with feeling duped. Every bibliophile I’ve met (and I meet a lot every single day) seems to have a torturous relationship with covers. On one hand, there is guilt at being tricked, beguiled by covers that are beautiful or "cool". At worst, it can make you feel like a toddler screaming for a balloon you like. At best, it’s a guilty surrender, the literary equivalent of buying yet another dual-set of Gü puddings. Yet, that indescribable guttural desire all book-lovers feel when they see a book whose genre, subject matter, relevance and style all coalesce – it’s undeniable. Publishers yearn for these retail opportunities – when enough people feel a compulsion for something that has not yet been reified by modern advertising and, driven by that compulsion, are willing to spend £9.99 on it on a Saturday afternoon.

An author I chatted to recently revealed that they’d heard a publicist unironically use the phrase ‘yellow is sell-ow’

Take Butter by Asako Yuzuki, for instance. It’s an excellent novel that deserves its place on the bestseller lists of 2024. But there is no denying its success is in part down to its bang-on-trend cover and its hot-button subject matter. In February 2024, when it was published, could there have been a more exquisite, marketable Venn diagram of themes than professional cooking (in the wake of TV shows like "The Bear"), Japanese literature (as a surge of Japanese works are being translated into English for the first time), and serial killers (never out of style, thanks to true crime)? The cherry on the cake was a grabbing cover: a constellation of instantly parsable symbols (cow, blood, Japanese characters), a bright yellow cover (an underused block-colour at the time) and a one-word title that is the name of something no one on the planet dislikes: butter.

It’s been a huge success – I imagine also because most people who have read it have enjoyed the experience. But in the wake of success come the imitators. It is now April 2025 and over the course of the past year it’s been hard to move for books with bright yellow covers. An author I chatted to recently revealed that they’d heard a publicist unironically use the phrase "yellow is sell-ow".

Great covers grow imitators, imitators become trends and, in the most contagious cases, trends become the defining cover of an entire genre. Think about it: there must have been one airport thriller that coined the now-ubiquitous thriller template – neon block lettering, a despairing stock urban landscape, a silhouette running away.

These days it seems impossible to avoid these book cover clichés. As a bookseller, my workday is almost exclusively made up of staring at covers for eight straight hours, on the shelves, over emails, on wholesale websites, in marketing POS.

After a while, you can’t help but see through the Matrix, as the patterns emerge and warp into ridiculousness. The literary fiction millennial woman with her face in her hands. The lithe YA teenagers, almost-but-not-quite touching. Gothic romantasy swirls. Self-help circles. Japanese cats. These repetitive symbols start to obscure the fact that these books have anything actually written in them at all.

So, faced with this kaleidoscopic copy-and-paste design landscape, how should a reader behave? What else is there to do but judge? Decide what seems phony to you and avoid. But if you see something that beguiles you, be beguiled. What’s the worst that can happen? You read a bad book? There are plenty more. And, don’t worry, they’re yellow too.

Ben Pope: The Cut is at Assembly Box, Edinburgh Fringe, 30th July to 24th August (not 11th).