Submitted by Battlepikapowe4 t3_10nrpqr in books
I've noticed these "stickers" advertising for their respective adaptations on two book series I want now. The Witcher and The Wheel of Time. They are annoying, to say the least. But surely, once the shows have ended for a while, those advertisements wouldn't be printed on new prints, right? I don't think any publisher would want to keep printing them if they're no longer getting paid for it.
What do you all think?
Nobody does. Seems like a waste of money to make those beautiful covers, only to ruin them with those stickers.
Just hoping that the movie/show ones go away after enough time has passed.
>Nobody does
Sure they do-lots of people who aren't avid readers but love a series get drawn in and buy the book, even if they never read it. It's a marketing tactic that wouldn't have carried on for years if it didn't prove profitable.
I don't like those covers, and especially hate when a book cover gets changed to the actors that are in the movie or TV show.
I work in a print shop.
The problem isn't the stickers. It's that the people buying the stickers don't understand that adhesives and paper matter.
It's the same with price tags and sale stickers. It's all well and good until you try to peel off the sticker and it doesn't come off cleanly. In a perfect world, the people buying the stickers would purchase the correct sticker stock for the application so that it's always easy to remove.
When done correctly, stickers are always better than the movie/tv show tie-in cover.
These aren't real stickers. What is being discussed is literally printed onto the book in the shape of a sticker.
A bit off-topic, but once an author wins a prestigious award, all their books will highlight this on the cover.
So it looks like every book won that award.
I've been tricked by that before. Never again.
Win? The last book I finished had two shortlisted "stickers".
Shit, I’ve seen a few books bragging about being long listed
I bought the witcher bookset, in the pictures there was no advertisment, once i got them, they all had ads, every single book, box included, fml!
I was quite upset when The Witcher had Netflix plastered all over their content and books. I recently learned (on Reddit actually) that there is a new hardcover set with beautiful artwork not tainted by the advertisements being done by Orbit. You can check them out here. I recently picked up the first 2 at my local B&N.
Well now i'm mad!
They do eventually. My copy of Lord of the Rings was printed 5 or so years before the movies. It has a soon to be adapted banner on it. I think it took about a decade for the movie covers to die out. However, now they all have Ring of Power stickers.
That's at least somewhat of a relief. Got enough on my to be read list to wait out the witcher and wheel of time ones then.
Websites like thrift books often have old versions available.
I have a copy of "soon to be a major motion picture" Dune. 🫠
I'm okay with advertising that fact because, hey, it does draw sales. I just hate it when it's literally part of the cover art so it can't even be peeled away.
That's my biggest problem with it as well. I'd be fine with an actual sticker, I can just peel that off. But they somehow found it necessary to start printing them on the cover itself.
It's cheaper than a sticker, that's why. Sucks but it's true. 🫠
Arrbooks challenge: not to make the same thread every single week.
Difficulty: impossible!
The Netflix sticker on my Heartstopper book turned out to be a permanent part of the cover design. I thought the stickers were bad 😡
The publishers don’t get paid to run those “ads” on books. Normally they request the use of it from the film/tv company as it drives sales of the books, and the film/tv doesn’t mind the extra exposure.
In theory they’d stop using the sticker once they release the new official tie-in artwork cover to the tv/show when it’s out. However, when it’s a series, that new cover usually only applies to book one so the rest of the books with often still get stuck with the sticker!
That's even more disheartening.
It's cheaper to print that way, so probably not, especially with the recent exponential increase in paper costs. Don't worry, I hate them too 😤
I purchased Dune around when the movie was coming out and it had a sticker on it advertising it. I removed the sticker thinking that there would be nothing under it but oh I was so wrong.
Turns out not only did the book have that sticker but under it was the same advertisement but printed on the cover. I have no idea why they added that sticker if it was already on the cover but it gave false hope.
Wow. They wasted money just to spite you.
If the 'sticker' seems to be helping sales at all, and/or if it would cost anything to revert to the pre-sticker cover, you're probably out of luck.
The paperback italian Lord of the Rings covers have recently been changed to show an image from the new RoP series on Prime.
Not exactly a sticker, but man are they fucked up looking. What sort of book cover designer or marketing person thinks that that looks okay!
No book needs a sticker/image from a series.
Award/prize stickers, adaptation advertisements (and tie-in covers!), book clubs, etc. all annoy me, too! I honestly go out of my way, even if it means paying more, to find copies without those stickers printed on the cover.
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Fret less about the cover and more about the contents. I may admire a particular cover, but I don't buy a book for looking at the single outside page. I buy it for what's inside. Slap whatever you want on the cover that helps the book sell. Or don't. It would be impossible for me to care less about it. The cover is not the story being told. It's a sales device. Sometimes artistic, sometimes not.
Sure, we care about the contents far more than the covers. But having to look at an ad each time you pick up the book again to read is infuriating. On top of that, some books you love so much that you want to display them fully on your shelf. Good luck doing that with the sticker being such an eye sore.
My suggestion then is to simply read more books. That way you can find less trivial things to be infuriated about. This may come across as me being sarcastic. It's not meant as such. Stickers or whatnot on books is really such a inconsequential thing.
Call the publishing company directly. Tell them you'll pay them an additional hefty amount to have a copy of the book in question reprinted without the sticker or logo. They can, and for a high enough fee most certainly will reprint you your own copy, because they're not going to stop printing them with stickers if it makes them more money through contracts with movie and television promoters and helps push overall book sales. If displaying the book that you love is of such significant importance and such stickers or logos are really ruining the aesthetic to such a massive degree as you make it out to be, the additional few hundred dollars should be money well spent.
The other option is to not sweat little things in life. Be Zen about it and say fuck it, it's no big deal.
You know what? I'll be zen about this comment and continue to not buy books that have those "stickers" on them.
That was always an option from the start, but the loss is still yours by making the cover more important than the content.
But I'm not, though. Maybe I wasn't all that clear. At the moment there's the two fantasy series I listed who don't have paperback editions without the sticker. I've got plenty of other series on my TBR list, so I can just wait with those two until they get new editions. Or until I can comfortably afford the hardbacks.
The content's not in question, because I'm still going to read those books at some point and I've never read them.
Idk. I only read unfilmable books.
I, on the other hand, only read videobooks.
Maybe you just read books that aren’t interesting enough to be filmed?
Marciamallowfluff t1_j6afz2q wrote
I do not like them or the book club stickers, etc.