stupid book covers

sometimes i fuck around with book cover ideas that are mostly stupid, or sometimes serious, or to augment a joke, or not-quite-a-joke, in a group DM, but usually they don't end up being used for anything. this post is a collection of some of the covers, because i think they're kind of interesting.

1. sometimes cavin sends silly selfies to me or in a group DM and i turn them into fake book covers. this one is from a selfie cavin sent me when he was working security at a health clinic during peak covid. i think his hair looks cool in this picture:

 

 

2. this one happened in two stages. the first was sebastian castillo riffing on twitter about the cover for his book not i, how he liked the real cover, but joked that he wished it had included a picture of him doing skateboard tricks in front of the guggenheim museum (which was on fire) or something like that. i made a quick photoshop thing to that effect with sebastian's face and replied to the tweet with it, which got word west to follow me on twitter, i think. then i joked with some people in a group DM about repurposing my old longer 'normal' stories to make Tao Lin the protagonist of each one and self publishing it (replete with unauthorized melville house logo) - hence the synopsis referencing actual stories i've written for this fake cover. i liked the idea of it being confusing about who wrote the book / what the book actually was. but altogether it seemed like an overly weird thing to try to publish in any capacity, but i still think the cover looks cool. i also like the idea of calling stories "touchdowns":

3. this is me putting a joke mike made into a book cover. i like jokes like this, about convoluted ideas followed by "and Other Stories." i like the font on it. i would probably pick this book up if i saw it at a book store. edit: mike actually wrote a story based on this, and it was published on xray. i have been trying to encourage mike to write a collection/novel based on this character/setting and he seems to be working on it to some capacity:

4. i struggled for a while coming up with a cover for chainsaw blurbs & other blurbs. i'm happy with the one we landed on (giacomo was very supporting/encouraging), but this was one of the later contenders. i like the weird emptiness of the back image:

 

5. i briefly toyed with the idea of making a sort of imprint under back patio for a chapbook run with thematically similar covers - public domain drawings about death/skeletons and bold colors. i think cavin will be doing something similar, a bundle of 'mini books' in 2021, unrelated to this idea. i think i was dissuaded by the general purposelessness of publishing books and lack of plan after making some covers. unsure about the font, but in general i think they look cool:

 

6. this is an idea i pitched to jenn at xray when talking about Bobby DiGiorno Will Fucking Die, which seems likely to be published as part of a small novel(la) series by xray. it is based on the cover of the sellout. turns out that even though jenn asked about my thoughts on a cover, they already have a cover scheme idea, so this won't be the cover, but i really like how it looks and would like to make a book that looks like this, either for myself or someone else, at some point:

i enjoy making book covers, although personally i think i would like to have a book with hand-drawn art/text sometime. i feel less compelled by plain, digital design on book covers.