Years working in a bookstore will teach you a lot about book covers and how people respond to them—not only can you often tell when a book’s good cover is selling it better than it should’ve sold, your own brain gets so used to the different tropes, you feel like you know exactly what a book will be by looking at the cover, the old adage be damned. That’s mostly just you trusting publishers to correctly aim their product at the right reader, and it doesn’t matter how many times you learn your lesson that they can really fuck it up, your brain loves an image. And it’s not just about genre—if book covers consistently whitewash their characters, or use obnoxiously gendered design, it does have an impact on who reads what and how we think about books.

Earlier this week, young adult author Maureen Johnson tweeted this:

And it kicked off a crowdsourced experiment in response to the fact that, like a lot of books by and about girls and women, her books get hot pink cursive and hearts and sexy white girl torsos on their covers.

She called her challenge “the cover flip” and asked people on Twitter and Tumblr to redesign existing book covers for the opposite gender, and then collected the best examples here. Check ’em out, some of them are really perfect.

Paul wrote about a similar conversation in the sci-fi/fantasy world last year.