Judging a Book by its Cover

Cover art can be stylish, funny, or beautiful. Its aim is to entice you to pick up and read a book and its usually very effective! However, from this stems a major pet peeve of mine…

It drives me crazy when cover art has inaccurate depictions of what is detailed inside the story!

I have seen several books where the shop on the cover doesn’t match the description inside. I’m not going to name titles because that seems mean because it is really hard to write a book and I don’t think it’s the author’s decision. Of course, they would want the image to look like what they had in their minds.

But publishers - if you know the setting is so important to the story that you want to use it to sell the book, why not design it to look like what is referenced on the pages? The book says the facade is brick, but the cover image has white walls. The sign for the shop has a different logo than what is mentioned in the pages. The description says the shop has two glass doors, but the cover has one red one. (Is this a red herring?)

It frustrates me a lot.

It also is weird if an animal is depicted differently than what’s in the story. On one cover, there were two adorable puppies running around, but inside the book, they were just born and could barely crawl! They could have still been adorable on the cover, so I don’t understand the change.

I don’t understand choosing to make realistic images, but then not choosing to have them match the story. The more stylized the art is, the more I understand that it is just trying to invoke emotion and intrigue. However, if you put something on the cover that is made to look like the true setting where an amateur sleuth could solve a crime - why not make it look like the setting that the author told the reader about? 

Does this bother anyone else? Or am I just crazy…?