First, let me say that- as a reader- I despise misleading cover art. I HATE a photo that looks nothing like the described character. As to whether Bloomsbury is a nest of racist vipers, I can’t say.

This is my experience- as a designer- of book cover design projects:

Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 1: We need a cover for this book titled Seventeenth Century Colonial Teaspoons in Peru: The Gold, The Bad, and the Ugly.
Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 2: And we need it yesterday afternoon.
Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 3: Here’s a printout of the design that Suzie, the Senile Secretary, created using Paint Shop Pro and her six year old granddaughter’s assistance. Use it as your guide.
Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 1: No, you can’t have the manuscript, because I hate you. And also, nobody knows where it is.
Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 2: BTW, don’t start to think you have a budget. Just see what you can do with the computer you brought from home and the watercolors you have on your desk for some mysterious artsy reason.
Designer: Aaargh!

A week passes.

Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 3: I can tell you right off the bat that Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 5 won’t want the gold teaspoons on the cover because the book is mostly about silver teaspoons, so could you change that? I know the title says gold, but the title isn’t finalized.

Another week passes.

Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 4: I like this cover, but I have this great picture of copper teaspoons that my young lover research assistant took on our research trip to Peru. Can we put some butterflies on the cover?

Four days pass.

Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 2: All the other Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figures are out of the office, but we need to send the cover design to the printer by tomorrow, and why are these butterflies on the cover? Replace them with sweet pink birdies, and the spoons need to be silver, not copper.

A day passes.

Crotchety Lunatic Boss Figure 4: Why are these birds on here?

And so on, and so on.