Where have I seen you before?

As I'm sure you can tell by now, I'm super excited about my new group blog, Girlfriends Book Club.


Last week, Roberta Isleib did a post about what she's been reading and I really enjoyed it, but something really bugged me.  I could have sworn that I'd seen the cover art for Maddie Dawson's The Stuff That Never Happened.  Gorgeous cover, right?!

It was seriously driving me crazy.  So, instead of writing, I googled my morning away, trying to remember which book had the same cover art.  Luckily, the smarties over at She reads and reads figured it out for me!  Drum roll, please:


It was Jill A. Davis's second novel, Ask Again Later.

What threw me off is was a visit to my bookshelf.  When I bought the book, the cover looked like this:

And I do think that the back-of-the-head cover is much, much better.  Very evocative and really draws a reader in.

But it brings up an interesting question.  Most book covers use stock photos-- to do a whole photo shoot for a book would simply be way too expensive (although in an interview about Girls in Trucks, Katie Crouch said that for her book, they did just that), so it would stand to reason that some books have the same covers.  Okay, a lot of books have similar covers.

As a former trademark attorney, I just have to ask:  does this create consumer confusion?  Am I drawn to The Stuff that Never Happened simply because it reminds me of Ask Again Later, a book I really enjoyed?  Probably not, because I think that The Stuff that Never Happened has got a pretty great premise, and that's what's drawing me in, but if you were the authors of the books, how would you feel about this?  As an author, I think it would bother me a lot.

And as Karin Gillespie pointed out to me, The Stuff that Never Happened was written by Maddie Dawson, who is really Sandi Kahn Shelton and the copycat cover thing has happened to her before!

Scandal!!

What say you??