First Research Dump

I have just completed my review of the covers visible on Amazon under the relevant Genres. So... What have I learned?
1. Amazon sorts its books by genre extremely badly:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_2?rh=n%3A266239%2Cn%3A!1025612%2Cn%3A56%2Cn%3A279292%2Cn%3A279295&bbn=279292&ie=UTF8&qid=1271292875&rnid=56

'The Prince' okay maaaybe you can count it as social-science-fiction, although there isn't actually any fiction in it. 'Tom's Midnight Garden'? 'The Hobbit'?

2. Depending on how you sort you get very different results. By Best Average User Rating you tend to get different editions of the same classic texts, 'Dune' or The 'Lord Of The Rings'. By Best Selling you get a mixture of results that are heavily skewed by TV and Movie Tie-Ins, at present 'True Blood' by Charlene Harris, 'The Twilight' books by Stephanie Meyer and TV spin offs from 'The 4400' and 'Torchwood'. Also evident is the highly fractured nature of the science-fiction and fantasy genres. It includes fiction with a magical or supernatural element in a contemporary setting- ranging from 'Harry Potter' to the noir-ish 'Dresden Files', fiction that deals with the social sciences such as Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque Cycle' or '1984', fiction that blends surrealism, psychology and magical-realism such as China Mieville's 'The City and The City'. Both can be seen as meta genres that overlap other genres such as detective fiction or romance. This complicates the issue of what to pick.

3. Due to this fracturing and diversity there is a wider range of book covers styles and designs out there. See in particular the covers of Kim Harrison's witchy series. These styles become bland and obvious, following trends that mark out what they are. This You Tube Video demonstrates that the covers of today urban fantasy fiction are no less consistent or predictable than the shoulder-baring pulp damsels and gun flare of yore:



4. Classic texts of science-fiction (and some fantasy) are also published under literary classics ranges, with creative cover designs that lift them out from any visual ghetto. These books, for example 'War of the Worlds', 'The Man in The High Castle' or perhaps even '2001'/'2010' may not need the attention of this project. But then is this project about reversing a trend or is it about giving overlooked books a new exposure- if it is the later will it automatically be the later?

Covers that inspired posts such as http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LegCling and http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ may not be being published anymore, but the stereotype persists, and other trends have arisen that are equally suspect.

So the next step is to revise the research Strategy to be more knowledge led and to refine to question to identify exactly what books need making more visible- which are actually afflicted by bland or stereotypical covers.