The /r/Fantasy Cover Olympics: Gardens of the Moon results & Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Qualifying.
[](/GNU Terry Pratchett)
###What are the Cover Olympics?
This has come about as a result of this post. Basically, the idea is that for certain popular series with multiple covers, we will vote for the best cover art. Each country will put forward a single cover, decided based on qualifying rounds. The books will effectively function as olympic "sports", and points will be given to the countries of the 1st (3pts), 2nd (2pts) and 3rd (1pt) placed covers for each book.
The country with the most points after 5/10 series (depending on how much interest there is in this) will be crowned the winner!
Gardens of the Moon Winners
So, you guys have voted, and our Gardens of the Moon medallists are...
In 3rd place, is our Chinese cover!
In 2nd place, we have the UK cover!
But our gold medallist for Gardens of the Moon is... this USA cover!
As Portugal and Spain also use this cover, they also receive Gold medals. While there are many countries who use the same artwork as the UK cover, only the UK uses the purple colour scheme, and as such no additional silver medals have been awarded.
This leaves the Olympic table looking as follows:
| Country | Gold Medals | Silver Medals | Bronze Medals | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 2 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| France | 0 | 3 | 0 | 6 |
| Portugal | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| United Kingdom | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| Denmark | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Finland | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Romania | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| United States of America | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Hungary | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Iran | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| China | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Germany | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Italy | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Netherlands | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
With all other countries at zero points! Without any Simonetti magic to fall back on, France fails to gain any medals, and loses its position at the top of the table to Spain - who lead by virtue of having more gold medals.
Harry Potter Qualifying
There are a lot of Harry Potter covers. A LOT. So a qualifying stage is necessary for this book. Thanks to a bunch of people for sending in covers, I'm pretty sure I've managed to include them all. I should note though, that I am not including any covers that aren't specifically tied to a published book. So, any custom covers or jackets (such as the lovely Juniper Books jackets) have not been included in the poll. In addition, none of the house editions will be included in this poll.
So... Please vote for your favourite covers from each country here!
What's Next?
Well, I said that I'd maybe stop at 5 books, so Harry Potter might be the last book in the Cover Olympics. At least, the last for this year. If there's enough interest, I might keep this going for another couple of books. 10 would be simply too much work for one person, but I could maybe extend this to 7.
If you want a few more books for the Cover Olympics, then mention which books you'd like to see in the comments. Remember, there has to be enough covers to make the poll worthwhile, but not too much that it becomes impossible. So something like Lord of the Rings is just too much work, but something like American Gods or Mistborn is possible.
Posted Aug 15, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC