Wrote off variant covers as a straight up cash grab for years. Every shop I walked into had them locked behind glass at prices that made zero sense for a book I actually wanted to read. Then some older dude at a flea market table in Fresno pulled out a long box and showed me a few older variants from the 80s and 90s, and how the art on them was totally different from the regular run. He wasn't even trying to sell me hard, just talking about how these were made for actual fans of the artist, not for speculators. Something clicked right there, because I saw the point wasn't the resale value, it was getting a cover you actually want to look at. Still hate the hype ones with 47 different versions, but I get why people chase the ones that mean something now.

Oh man this hits home so hard. We had some guy tell us the exact same thing about keyword density back in like 2019, and he was SO sure about it too. Told us Google counts how many times a word shows up and rewards you for hitting a magic number. We stuffed our pages so full of the same phrase over and over that the posts barely made sense to actual humans anymore. Traffic tanked within weeks and one of our old product pages started ranking for some random thing about bird feeders, which we have never sold in our lives. The worst part is these guys always say it with total confidence so you feel dumb for doubting them. That pickle thing you mentioned is hilarious but also exactly how dumb this stuff gets.