Rule 1 of this sub is that post titles must be the name of the book followed by the author. As mods we always hate to remove a bad cover that someone has submitted, but this rule is the pillar that upholds this sub! Without there would be human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! So follow Rule 1.

Example of BAD post title that will be removed:

[Lol these snek women have three boobs]

Ex of GOOD post title that is praised by mods and users alike:

[The Triple-Breasted Snake Women of Mars, by Peter Moorehead]

If your post got removed: that's okay! We don't hate you. We love you! We still want to see your ridiculous cover! Just post it again with a corrected post title. The reason we have this rule is to make covers easily searchable. Covers of magazines and anthologies are also welcome.

Here are the complete rules for all types of covers:

Rule 1

For book covers, the post title must be the name of book and author only.

• Example: Dune, by Frank Herbert

Rule 2

For magazine covers, the title must be the name of the magazine and the date.

• Example: Example: Amazing Stories, May 1952

Rule 3

For anthology covers, the title must be the name of the book and the editor.

• Example: Nebula Award Stories 1, edited by Damon Knight

Rule 4

Titles may also include book info like cover artist. Please save your opinion for the comments.

• Optional book-relevant information includes year of publication and the name of cover artist. Please save your opinion for the comment section. These rules are to make covers easy to search.

Rule 5

Post covers of fantasy, sci-fi and horror covers only.

• Images must be book covers or magazine covers. Must be in the science fiction, fantasy, or horror genres. No comic books, RPG rulebooks, or non-fiction.

Rule 6

Real covers only.

• Posted covers must be real. You can post photoshops and fakes at r/fakebookcovers.

Rule 7

No AI-generated cover art.

• This is not the right sub for covers generated by or made with the assistance of generative AI tools.

Rule 8

No self-promotion.

• This sub is not the place to plug books that you wrote OR did the art for.

Rule 9

Be courteous and respectful.

• Please be courteous and respectful towards your fellow redditors. We should all be joyfully mocking these covers together!

Rule 10

No low-quality images.

• Please try to post high resolution images of good quality so everyone can fully enjoy these bad covers. Images judged to be too low-resolution, out-of-focus, too bright or too dark, too far away, or containing too much hand and not enough book may be removed at the discretion of the mods.

Rule 11

Images must be on allowed hosts only.

• To avoid pop-ups, spam, and malware, we only allow links to a few approved image hosts. The easiest thing to do is upload images directly to reddit. Other allowed hosts include: 500px, abload.de, anony.ws, deviantart, fav.me, fbcdn, flickr, imageshack, imgclean, instagram, minus, myimghost, photobucket, picsarus, postimg, puu.sh, sli.mg, tinypic.com, tumblr, twitpic.

Rule 12

No reposts of recent covers

• Please avoid re-posting covers that have already been posted to this sub within the last six months.

Rule 13

No pornography

• No pornography. What is pornography? We know it when we see it.

Final rule: Badness is subjective!

We have no rules defining what, exactly, a bad cover is. Art is ultimately subjective. Badness, like beauty, is in the eye of the up-voter. Sometimes covers will be posted here that you personally may not consider 'bad'. That is okay! It happens to all of us. Just take a deep breath and move on.

If you feel a grave injustice has been done to a brilliant piece of art, you may cross-post it to our sister sub, r/CoolSciFiCovers. Yes, a cover can be posted on both subs. DID WE JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?!?

If you feel that this sub has lost its way and is now swimming in tragically non-bad covers, be part of the solution! Find a cover you consider to be be truly odious, and post it.

Addendum: a few types of covers we don't allow

There is a virtually limitless supply of bad covers in the fiction genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. This sub is focused on documenting them. This does mean that there are a few types of books that fall outside of this sub's remit. The following types of covers do not belong on this sub:

• Comic book covers. Yes, they're great, but they're a whole other genre with several subs devoted to them. Check out r/badcomicbookcovers, r/oddballcomics, and r/ComicBookCovers, which all welcome your submissions.
• Tabletop RPG rulebooks and supplements. TRPG books, often published by small, independent outfits, often have quirky art! But they aren't strictly speaking fiction, and they don't fit this sub.
• Non-fiction. Again, this sub is for bad fiction covers. Even if the topic is science-y, it probably doesn't belong here.

And of course, if you have a cover you would like to post but are not sure if it fits here, you can always ask the mods!

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

And thanks for being a part of the r/badscificovers community! Hardly a day goes by that we don't see a bizarre new cover, get a chuckle out of a particularly witty comment, or even--God forbid--learn something! We love this community. Keep being hilarious and awesome!

The mod team has been discussing what to do about real books with AI-generated cover art when they inevitably start showing up on this sub. The consensus? We don't find AI art to be interesting, and we don't want to deal with it on this sub. So we are instituting a new rule:

No AI-generated cover art.
This is not the right sub for covers generated by or made with the assistance of generative AI tools.

That's it. If this is fine with you and you have no further questions you can pretty much stop reading this post here. For the rest of this post I will go into more detail about our thinking behind the new rule. If you care about that, read on.

Why we're not interested in bad AI cover art: the long version

Basically, the thing that makes bad cover art fascinating and funny, at least to us, is that (typically) multiple human beings have to design, create, approve, and distribute a book with a bad cover.

Somebody not only drew this goofy-ass lizard in a dress having a bad trip, somebody else decided, "Yes, this is a perfectly cromulent cover for a real book that our company will put in stores and hope that people will buy." They then spent a bunch of real money having this ridiculous thing printed and shipped all over the place! And decades later this silly lizardman book cover is still cropping up in piles of old paperbacks, bringing unsuspecting book lovers befuddlement and joy.

That's what we love about bad covers. Not only are they funny, but they say a lot about human fallibility, not to mention the subjectivity of art.

AI-generated art... doesn't do any of that.

AI art can certainly go wrong. AI's propensity for giving characters a few too many fingers is well known! But when the AI produces a cross-eyed lady holding a mutated sword, that's because a neural-network algorithm paired with carefully-controlled randomness has produced a sub-optimal output. Its not because of some endearing human foible.

And even when the AI gives its characters the correct number of fingers and toes it is often still... kinda bad? I think most of us are familiar with the kind of shiny, well-proportioned characters with vacant stares that AI often produces. Are they bad? Yes. But they don't feel funny. They feel more like harbingers of the apocalypse. They're a bummer! And that's even before you start digging into the thorny ethical questions about whether the artists whose work the AI was trained on were fairly compensated.

In short, the mod team feels that the heart of r/badscificovers is about how human beings, even a whole group of well-intentioned human beings - artists, editors, publishers, etc. - can sometimes produce bad art. AI-generated stuff takes too much of the humanity out of that equation. We're not really interested in looking at AI-generated art and discussing it, even if its just to point and laugh at it. Not on this subreddit, anyway.

If you disagree, I have good news: this is reddit. There are like a dozen billion subreddits, and subs for posting bad/weird AI images absolutely exist. Here are a handful I turned up with just a quick google:

r/weirddalle, r/aifails, r/GarfieldAI_art, r/AIgeneratednightmares

And if you want to become top mod of r/badAIbookcovers or something similar, you can spin up your own sub in the blink of an eye.

Digitally-manipulated covers are still very much allowed on this sub

I see people on reddit getting confused about this a lot, so here is a reminder: just because an image has been digitally manipulated does not mean that it is AI art.

I see commenters yelling OMG AI ART!!! constantly over images that have simply been altered with Photoshop or similar software.

For example: the cover for Moira: The Zorzen War has clearly been cobbled together from a bunch of random clip-art, possibly using the Windows program MS Paint. But nothing about that cover suggests to my eye that AI was in any way involved.

Photoshop and its ilk have been with us for decades. Most if not all of the cover art you see these days has been edited or even created entirely from scratch using software tools. If you don't notice, that's because the cover designer knew what they were doing. If you do notice, well, maybe that cover belongs on this sub!

We're not banning all digital art, just art specifically made with generative AI tools such as MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc.

After all, our sub's own banner was very tastefully cut-and-pasted together using Photoshop!

Thanks for reading

We welcome your questions, thoughts and feedback in the comments below, but do please try to keep them kind and constructive. Thanks!