Recently, the pleasure was mine to attend Magazine Street 2025 in Glasgow, where Andy Cowles discussed how magazine covers can encourage subscribers through visual design. 

Andy is a design expert, humbly acknowledging his career history as Creative Director at Rolling Stone NYC (2025). At Magazine Street he encouraged magazines looking to increase subscriptions to put the focus on cover design. “A cover is a piece of art, but it’s also a pretty cold, calculating, commercial proposition” (Cowles 2025). Andy emphasises the importance of magazine cover design cohesion, to draw in subscribers through the allure of the cover as a means of “connection” (2025).

Image 1: Andy Cowles at Magazine Street 2025, taken by me.

To Andy, a magazine cover is a “shop window” (2025) by which you entice people in through the collated display of your work’s content. There is no reason why book covers should be treated differently. 

But they are. 

If you have been to a bookshop lately you will have noticed the increase of romance books with similar cartoon covers. A title that has accumulated controversy recently is Icebreaker by Hannah Grace, due to its childlike cartoon cover despite its sexually explicit content (Grigg, 2024). Many of these books are written as standalone works despite them having such similarities that one might believe they are part of a series. Romance books seem to be following a marketing strategy that insists on consistent design as the selling point of a book in competition with others like it, evoking a feeling of mass production that lacks a lot of integrity to an individual book’s content. The covers also illustrate mature books in a rather immature way, increasing the risk of younger audiences reading age-inappropriate content. 

Covers are perhaps less important to a book reader than a magazine cover to a subscriber, since magazine design is far more visual. It is also important to understand that book cover design is rarely a main responsibility of the author and is instead usually made by publishing house designers to maximise marketability. This disconnection can be to the detriment of the author of such books by removing their individuality.  

The strategy behind these covers assumes that someone enjoying one romance may pick up another that looks like it, sidestepping the reason people like books – the words inside. Two authors with similar covers usually have different writing styles, different things that make them tick, and in turn will produce very different books. The biggest thing, to me, that these cartoon covers achieve, is an exposure of the financial motivation behind publishing these books, making the whole product feel a little bit soulless. No author deserves that. 

Book marketers should listen to Andy’s tips, as they could help encapsulate the passion that authors put into books through design. Return individuality to book covers and maintain cohesion and continuity only when the books belong together as part of a single author series. The romance genre of fictional books is a categorisation technique and should remain as one – genre should not be treated by cover designers as the main brand marketing technique.  

Cowles ended his talk by stating that a magazine’s cover “is a means by which you can effectively tell an entire brand’s story” (2025). I believe that for romance books, the brand is the story, and not the genre it pertains to.

Bibliography 

Cowles, Andy, 2025 ‘How covers sell subscriptions’, Magazine Street, Glasgow, 3 October 2025. 

Grigg, Jenny, 2024 ‘Explicit novel Icebreaker is under fire for its ‘misleading’ cover. A book designer explains – and reveals how covers work’ [online], available at: https://theconversation.com/explicit-novel-icebreaker-is-under-fire-for-its-misleading-cover-a-book-designer-explains-and-reveals-how-covers-work-237315#:~:text=Cartoon%20romance%20covers%20are%20reportedly,multiple%20instances%20of%20reader%20miscommunication%E2%80%9D. [Date accessed 8 October 2025]. 

Photos: 

Cover image: Icebreaker by Hannah Grace, taken from Amazon [online], available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Icebreaker-Hannah-Grace/dp/1398525685 [Date accessed 8 October 2025].  

Photo 1: Andy Cowles at Magazine Street, taken by me, 3 October 2025.