I know that you — all of you! — love my occasional entries in the “Gives Me Chills” post series, and wish they could be more frequent. Hey, I’m with you, but there are only so many DVD covers produced without the benefit of design competence.

There’s not such a scarcity in books, though. With the groundswell in self-publishing via Kindle and CreateSpace, there are scads and oodles of authors who think that just because they’re competent to string words together in a sentence (itself often a self-assessed competency), they can design their own book covers. Or hire their friend to do it — a friend who promptly subcontracts the task to his teenage daughter because she’s really better at that there PhotoShop thing.

It is thus with mingled horror and glee that I announce Horrendous Book Covers, a tumblog slapdashedly thrown together by little ol’ me to showcase the underwhelming excesses of DIY cover designers. So far I’ve mostly restrained myself from snide commentary — the covers speak for themselves, really — but my self-control on that front could easily slip in the days ahead.

I leave you with one final thought:

There. Consider yourself warned.