The Worst Cover Ever: The Winnowing

We asked for your help coming up with the worst title for the most awesomely bad cover ever, and you responded with over 350 entries! There are some truly inspired offerings that didn’t make the cut, but cut we must, and so without further ado we present, in no particular order, the best of the worst.

  • The Thing with the Glass Buttock
  • Rise of the Fallen, Book Seven, The Pre-Antepenultimate Battle
  • A Stain Upon The Vastness
  • Across a Trembling Sea the Cyborg Fairies Dance
  • An Old Dragon, A Dead Witch, and a Fat Guy: The Third Book of Stories that Go Nowhere.

Click here to vote for your favorite using our woefully unscientific poll.

So how did we narrow down the incredible range of offerings to just five? Well, first we had both our editorial and marketing teams pore over the list. They chose the titles they thought best exemplified the worst: giving special attention to titles that we thought would make awesome bad covers. Then we collated those and handed them over to our publisher who arbitrarily chose the titles he found funniest. (Our publisher, incidentally, was quite upset that his own suggestion — Fahrenheit 65 — didn’t make the shortlist.)

So, among these five finalists is there a title truly deserving of the worst SFF cover ever? We think so. And you can help us find it.

And incidentally — the word cloud of the submitted titles suggests that the worst title in the universe might include the words “Space”, “Mars”, “Love”, and “Vampires”, although those particular themes did not show up in the finalists. Just goes to show that there’s an art to everything.