About

Book Cover Edits refer to Photoshopped book covers that feature an edited title, subtitle or image.

Origin

On September 23rd, 2003, Fark ^[1] user Fabio announced a Photoshop contest titled "Theme: If the cover of computer books had Harlequin romance covers" which garnered 60 entries. Common Books^[2] posted a few of the entries in an article the next day (shown below).

Spread

On April 5th, 2005 Something Awful^[3] created a list of user submitted "Choose Your Own Adventure Books That Never Quite Made it" photoshops. One user, CosmoDNA, posted a book cover of a sad child which has an edited title that reads "You're Going to Die" (shown below, left). That same year, World of Longmire^[4] created a page of reimagined Romance Novels (example shown below, right).

Many more sites announced book cover Photoshop contests over the next few years. On February 15, 2008, Cracked^[8] collected user photoshop submissions for a list of "The 40 Most Inappropriate Children's Book Covers." User aiexc86 posted an edit of "Clifford the Big Red Dog" (shown below, left). On March 31st 2016, The subreddit r/fakebookcovers^[5] was created and has garnered over 900 members in three years. The "subreddit is dedicated to fake parody book covers." On March 11th, 2016 Instagram user Paperback Paradise^[6] posted their first book cover parody (shown below, left). The account has gained over 98,000 followers in three years.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References