Here at Goodreads, our editorial team spends a lot of time looking at books. Literally looking at them. We’ve discovered that if you take in thousands of book cover designs, day after day, you can enter a kind of fugue state where you start noticing distinct design patterns.
 
After about the 20th time of turning to one another and saying some variation of “What’s with all the [insert object] on book covers lately?” we decided to gather up the visual trends we’ve noted in book cover designs this year for our collective pondering. These are all books published or publishing in 2026, which makes the whole hive mind aspect of the trends even eerier.
 
Is there a larger pattern here? Is the universe trying to tell us something by way of commercial publishing trends? DO THE CIRCLES MEAN ANYTHING? No one knows. But it sure is fun to talk about.
 
Still, if you decode anything interesting, use the Want to Read button to track and arrange your own digital bookshelf. Have fun! Stay sane!