Authors’ books get ‘Coverflip’ treatment

Image credit: Book Revels

Similar to the Hawkeye Initiative’s commentary upon women in superhero comics: A Huffington Post slideshow features book covers with the author’s gender and the target audience’s gender flipped.

The idea originated with author Maureen Johnson who stated on Twitter, “I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says, ‘Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. - signed, A Guy’”

As  Johnson elaborated at Huffington Post:

“This idea that there are ‘girl books’ and ‘boy books’ and ‘chick lit’ and ‘whatever is the guy equivalent of chick lit’ gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints. ...

“Which is why yesterday, I proposed a little experiment on Twitter. I asked people to take a well-known book, then to imagine the author of that book was of the opposite gender, or was genderqueer, and imagine what that cover might look like.”

Johnson said she received “hundreds of replies within 24 hours.”

Social sharing credit goes to Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.