When a popular book becomes a major motion picture publishers change the cover art, or at the very least put a big red sticker one it. The Martian has Matt Damon’s face on half of the editions at the bookstore, ditto with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The Witcher book series is particularly awful in this regard, they just took some random piece of unrelated promotional artwork from the game and slapped it on the cover. One of the worst I’ve ever seen is the Gone Girl film tie-in cover. I feel that books lose their charm and appear second rate when their cover art is changed to take advantage of a movie or video game.
Booksellers are the main culprits behind new cover art. Most stores will almost exclusively stock film tie-in covers, and depending on the popularity of the title, a small number of original covers – if the original covers are still in print, and the simple reason for this being that the stores get a MUCH better margin on the film tie-ins and it’s such a shame.
An EX Waterstones employee said “Customers get confused when books claim they are the “movie tie-in edition” because some people think that means the story will be different then the original. In my opinion it would be much easier to simply put up a sign next to the books stating that they are now a major motion picture rather than ruining the cover.”
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