If you try to purchase the Wuthering Heights novel on Amazon this year, you may wonder whether you have accidentally wandered into a DVD section. The film tie-in edition—a reissued book with a cover featuring art, photos or branding connected to the movie or television adaptation—dedicates two-thirds of the cover to Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi swooning over each other in a scene from Emerald Fennell’s eponymous adaptation, which came out in February this year. The title sits in lacy pink lettering inside quotation marks. Emily Brontë’s name is tucked to one side. Funnily enough, it is exactly the same size as the “Now a major motion picture” sticker emblazoned on the other side.
Nothing about it makes me think of Yorkshire, cruelty or ghosts at the window. At best, it says date night.
And so I find myself wondering: who is this movie-poster book-cover really for? It cannot be the person with three hardback Brontës on their shelf. “For readers already invested in a book, the original cover holds a special place,” Ditsha Gupta, assistant Manager at Penguin Random House India, agrees. “Film tie-in editions, however,” she explains, “serve a different, but equally important purpose: they introduce books to new audiences.” Someone who has watched a film may not necessarily know it was adapted from a book. A familiar face closes that gap. “Whether they spot it at an airport bookstore, in a supermarket or while browsing Amazon, that familiarity can nudge them to pick up the book,” Gupta says. She does not see a contest between tie-ins and original book covers. For her, the two covers speak to different audiences.
Devnagana Dash, an independent art director and book designer, is less patient when she clocks that an original book cover has been swapped out for a movie poster. Still, she calls it a “calculated business move.” In a culture where celebrities are “virtually, and even practically, worshipped, doing a tie-in book jacket is an effective strategy to make the title instantly popular and recognisable to a broader audience.”
The turnoff is understandable. As a person who has spent the better part of her life with her nose buried in a book, tie-in covers—especially those where the motive is business and not beauty—can feel like heartburn. But I also recognise that we are in a reading recession, and so I’d rather have someone reach for a 400-page Victorian-era gothic novel simply because Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi look wildly good on the cover than not have them add it to their TBR pile at all.
That said, a book chasing instant recognition on the back of a movie poster comes at the cost of sameness fatigue. Amit Malhotra, a freelance book designer and one half of fashion label Gul Sohrab, posits that the streaming-platform boom is making the visual landscape more homogeneous. “There’s so much pressure to make a book instantly recognisable as the adaptation people are talking about. The face of an actor or the key art from a series is an easy way to make that connection, but it can also make editions look very similar to one another.”
The entire plot of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca hinges on the eponymous character’s absence. She is dead before the story begins, and the second Mrs. de Winter never gets a name. All of Manderley estate takes on a lifelike presence and claustrophobically presides over the newly-married couple. The Netflix tie-in cover answers this with two enormous faces. A novel about a woman you cannot see becomes a cover with two people you cannot avoid.
Dash explains why this happens. “A film tie-in cover already possesses a complete visual identity, outlining the actors, setting, mood, even the lighting.” A good book cover, by contrast, “operates on restraint.” A detailed face “may rob the reader of their personal imagination and meaning-making of those characters in their own worlds.” Avni Doshi, whose debut novel Burnt Sugar was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, describes a similar instinct. “I look for book covers that don’t give everything away immediately. I like images that evolve the more you look.”
Devashish Verma, an illustrator and cover designer with Speaking Tiger, makes a succinct argument: “A tie-in cover feels lazy when it looks like the publisher remembered the book only after the movie became popular. There’s a difference between using the film to bring readers to the book and making the book look like an afterthought to the film.” When a tie-in is done with indifference, it is met with resistance. Srijan D, a reader and writer, calls most of them “badly designed movie posters that I usually stack on my bookshelf spine side in.” Yet, Stephen King film adaptations have rekindled his curiosity for the books… and with good reason. The classic cover for It gives us a storm drain, a balloon and a terrifying pair of eyes. The 2017 tie-in cover features a child in a yellow raincoat being offered the same balloon by a hand emerging from the dark. It works because the same dread is given a new angle.
All these perspectives, but I still keep coming back to how few people seem to read for pleasure now. Paperbacks are in fierce competition with OTT apps that fit in your pocket. Perhaps it is altogether futile to be judgmental about how one arrives at a book. If a 20-year-old picks up Klara and the Sun because of Jenna Ortega, I would not bemoan the fact that it already has star power attached to it because it was written by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Gupta puts it more generously than the English lit major in me would: “Sometimes, the best thing a movie can do is make you want to turn the first page.”
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