A few years ago, after I read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (a stylistically complex, character-driven book that I highly recommend!), I suddenly noticed that book covers were all starting to look the same. I’d think, “is that The Vanishing Half AGAIN?”, but no, they were just more books with brightly colored, abstract covers. Lo and behold, this is no coincidence, it’s a thing! I bring you, the blob: 

Book covers, it turns out, are a lot like fashion: trendy. And like fashion, book covers go through cycles. This isn’t a new phenomenon; The Atlantic wrote an article about book cover look-alikes back in 2012. Here are a few other examples I found on my search.

There’s the popular stock image, which publishers use because they are easily accessible and keep costs down.

Then there’s the “someone definitely got murdered near this ocean and also I wrote the title by hand” (I named that one).

And who can forget about the minimalist flat woman (Tiffany Blue, anyone?).

I could go on and on (trust me), but I’ll leave the rest of this rabbit hole to you.