How to judge a book by its cover

Unless you want to make like Melanie Marquez, Jessa Crispin of Bookslut has a guide on how to judge a good (or bad) book by its cover:

1. If there's a woman on the cover, kind of shadowy and arty, it's bad. If there's a man on the cover, shadowy and arty, it's good.

2. You can tell by color choices and how many fonts are used. If too many fonts were used, nobody cared. Nobody edited that book.

3. If you've seen that picture somewhere else, they are just using stock clip art [bad sign].

4. Any sort of a blurred photograph [another bad sign].

5. A good sign: very clean cover design, with white space or very striking photographs. "It seems like the more attractive it is, the more edited it was, the more people cared about the book. Someone was paying attention to it."