Otherkin

  

I find it pretty impressive that a quote from a New York Times bestselling author could wind up on what looks like a self published book from Wattpad, and as a self published author, I think I have the right to make that comparison, so there.

There's not really anything exactly wrong with Otherkin (the book, anyway, can't speak for the lifestyle), but there's also not anything exactly right about it either. It's so very...there. It elicits feelings of about 2010-212 when Twilight, Hunger Games, Maze Runner and that sort of stuff was really popular, where you couldn't walk into a bookstore with a smattering of YA Fantasy shoved in your face like the stench from an armpit in a gym locker room. I mean, the font on the title is pretty cool, I'll give it that much, but that's exactly how I feel about this. It just looks like yet another book in a long line of books on the clearance rack after the YA boom of the early 2010's.

I'm also kinda irritated that, once again, from the description anyway, it sounds like it's yet another goody two shoes girl who discovers her true self and what she's capable of...AFTER MEETING A BOY. Can we just...be done with that, already, please? Christ sake. It's such a generic cover, and what makes it all the worse, honestly, is that they simply used it for front AND back cover. They didn't even come up with an alternate image or anything for the back, they merely slapped the same image from the front right onto the back one too! Talk about your lazy graphic design. And from what I gathered from Goodreads reviews, the lead girl has Scoliosis and wears a back brace because of it, which makes her "embarrassed" and "ashamed" and worrying that guys will reject her or pity her for her disability. As someone with a significant back injury myself, this is also incredibly mean. So okay, two checks now: girl who can't function in life without help of boy, girl who is ashamed of her disability. Cool. Off to a fantastic start here.

And apparently it's a fairly paint by numbers plot too. The sort of "mystical coming of age supernatural" plot everyone could sit down and write after watching Harry Potter. Girl doesn't fit in, girl discovers she has magic power, girl goes to school to be with others like her, girl becomes chosen one, blah blah blah. Jesus.

But I'm not here to critique the plot of a book I'll never read. I'm here to critique the artwork, and boy howdy, this one is rough. See, let me tell you something as an author, and that is this little trade secret: A cover is your best weapon. I know, I know, we have this whole "don't judge a book by its cover" mantra, and there's a lot of times where that mantra actually holds up. Just because a book has a terrible cover doesn't mean it's automatically a bad book. But a bad cover, even to an amazing story, can hurt your chances when a browsing potential reader skims across it on a shelf and shies away from it because it's so graphically displeasing and visually unpleasant, or in this books case, just so...ordinary. Book covers these days are a bit harder to judge, because cover art has become somewhat synonymous with just "aesthetically pleasing visuals" and often the covers don't really have anything to do with the book itself. Sometimes this is fine, a lot of times it isn't. But even then, those are usually so decent and good looking enough, even as standard graphical design fare, that they work, because they are pleasant looking. Loopy font mixed with vague pastel watercolor artwork. And if you think I'm kidding, think again. Go to a bookstore. You'll see I'm right.

But when a cover is mediocre...that's so much harder to judge, because it's not even interesting enough to think about, and lemme tell ya, this is about as generic as it comes, you guys. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Tigers. I like redheads. I AM a redhead. I'm sadly not a tiger, not yet anyway, but once genetic engineering and DNA splicing become commonplace you fuckers better watch out. I have nothing against this imagery, except that it's bland and dull and so very overdone.

Mediocrity is a worse place to be than just general badness, because at least badness gets recognized and remembered, whereas mediocrity simply gets forgotten.

Hence why this book was in a thrift store and not someones personal home library. 

Don't think I have to say much more besides that to prove my point.