Good Cover Art Gone Bad

On the whole, I think that the cover art by Daniel Dos Santos for Green by Jay Lake (US, UK, Canada, Indiebound, review) is quite good. It’s the kind of cover art that would make me pick up the book to see what it’s about – and I think it’s something that would likely appeal to a wide-ranging audience (even though it still somewhat fails the ‘would I want people to see me reading this in public’ test).

Then, I read the book. The character featured on the cover is the main character of the novel, also named Green. Yes, she is an adolescent girl, yes she cuts her face beneath a pomegranate tree (though I don’t recall her hanging upside down). So it fits. Only in the book Green is a person of color. In the very least she has dark skin – I always pictured her with a South Asian appearance to match my perception of the country she was born in, but her descriptions in the book leaves her appearance pretty open aside from the consistent description of dark skin.

So, why is a cover that is otherwise a fairly good representation of the content of the book misleading about this small bit? I’ve seen Jay Lake mention on either Twitter or his blog that he likes the cover a lot – now is he just saying this because that’s what a good author does, or does this little inconstancy bother him. I think it would really bother me.

The assumption I jump to is that there is a perception that a person of color in the place of the nice white girl we have instead could reduce the sales of the book. True or not, that really rubs me the wrong way. If it is true, nothing is going to change until there are more people of color on covers (see Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin with cover art by Todd Lockwood). Or it could be that the cover artist didn’t know that Green was a person of color, which is entirely possible since he was likely given only a short excerpt to base the cover art on).

Thoughts?