This "behind the scenes" teaser trailer from Orbit Books (awesome publishers of scifi and fantasy!) which shows, in time-lapse, How Yer Book Cover Gets Made won't make authors feel any better about the time and resources devoted to their book covers but it is fascinating and funny.
The best part of this is the single comment posted to it on Youtube, where a guy who's other videos show demos of homemade claymore landmines and also the worst comb-over of all time, complains about how this new cover is not like the previous covers of this series, inadvertently bringing to life every stereotype of people that'd read, I assume, victorian steampunk novels.
Oh geez, it even looks like he shaved the bald areas.
I'm noticing you said: 'awesome publishers of scifi and fantasy!'
and not 'publishers of awesome scifi and fantasy!'
because that book looks like a piece of crp.
Love this. The Millions has had some good book cover design related content. Here's one where they compare US versus UK covers, and here Sonya Chung writes about her own experience with the design process.
This is good too if you're into that sort of thing (which I am)
http://bookcoverarchive.com/
That video resembles a lot my dreams, it's a designers curse to dream about clipping paths and kerning type.
This is really good as well: http://bookworship.com/
I'm so happy to see that other users of Indesign do the same amount of pointless wiggling the image up and down .0005 degrees that I do.
the wiggling isn't pointless! it makes the self-important moron behind you going 'can you move it up a little, no wait, not that much...' feel like they are creative.