What's doing it for me right now

• The author's name is Japanese, Sub-Saharan African (I recognize Bantu origin most easily), Malay, or sounds like it might belong to a Latin American
• Views of water on the cover
• People swimming on the cover (profiles, incomplete shots, and abstracts only)
• Blue covers in general
• Green is a prospect almost exciting as blue
• Minimalism or Collage art
• Reviews by authors I've read
• An easily visible, eye catching title
• A title that sells the book (recent favourites are Music For Torching, The Thought Gang, The Whole Stupid Way We Are and Ghana Must Go)
• Abstract cover art
• Published by Penguin, Vintage, Conundrum, or any publishing house I haven't heard of
• Punctuated titles (think: Swamplandia! ; The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? ; Cry, The Beloved Country)

...And what just isn't

• The author's name is Chinese or Jewish (Before you cry "racist," in High School and the fall after my graduation I read a lot of books by Jewish and Chinese-American authors, so I'm putting these two on the back-burner for now. Everything just winds up repeating itself in the books I read from these two backgrounds. The cynical part of me is beginning to believe that they get published because these two ethnic identities sell books and win awards like nothing else).
• People doing anything but swimming on the cover
• Nude people on the cover (I'll make an exception for artistic, but only just)
• Pink covers. Always a turn off.
• The word novel printed anywhere on the front cover
• Celebrity reviews
• Reviews but no blurb
• About the author (play it traditional, leave this inside the back flap or on the endpaper, please)
• Author's name is clearly visible, the title is small (I don't care how famous you are- if your name is bigger than the title, then you're no longer selling your writing, you're selling yourself. This boils down to the book being unoriginal, likely due to the author and publisher being focused on making money rather than art and therefore choosing to go the route of the tried and true and not that of actual creativity).
• Reviews on the front of the book
• Pseudo-artsy photography of simple objects (think Twilight, think 50 Shades of Grey, think every book that you ever looked at and thought "this is being marketed to the lowest common denominator")
• A franchise name
• Anything that indicates the book belongs or ever will belong to a series longer than a trilogy. If it's contemporary lit even a sequel is not acceptable.