Book covers are important. I tend to judge a book on its cover, and will only read books with a naff cover if I know and like the author. And there are some terrible ones out there. In the old days, before Photoshop and computer graphics, when mass market paperbacks got the ‘cover artist’ treatment, like as not they looked as though they came out of a catalogue. Fantasy covers generally featured a plastic dragon, regardless of whether there was one in the plot, swords, and fellas on horses. Mystery and thrillers were usually black with red writing, with a dead woman, a revolver/knife, or a haunted house, as central feature.

Well, those days are gone now, and computers do book covers. They use photographs, so it’s more ‘real’. But it doesn’t seem to have got more imaginative. Now we see the same couple embracing against different backgrounds under different…