Why is it that books about Africa always look the same? A recent article on the blog Africa is a Country demonstrated that "the covers of most novels 'about Africa' seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King" - reducing it, no matter the subject, geographical area or writer, to an acacia tree and a sunset. This followed a Twitterstorm triggered by a tweet from SimonMStevens:

Stevens, a PhD candidate in international history at Columbia University, explained: "I was browsing in the university bookshop here at Columbia last month when I noticed a display of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. (...) The image of the acacia trees silhouetted against the orange sunset seemed strikingly familiar, so when I got home I spent a bit of time playing around on Goodreads and it soon became apparent how common a trope this was."

"Of course not all or even most books set in Africa have this imagery on the cover – as people have repeatedly felt the need to point out to me since I first tweeted this! – but what caught my attention was the variety of books with this cover trope that I had turned up in a very brief search," he said. What struck him was the fact that "in so many of the books that particular imagery bears so little relationship to the content. The books in the collage I put together are wildly varying: they're set in Botswana, the Congo, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, and range from the colonial adventure stories of Rider Haggard and the airport pulp fiction of Wilbur Smith, to the works of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature like JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, and Wole Soyinka."

A recent piece in The Atlantic pointed out that "what makes the persistence of these tired and inaccurate images even worse is that we're living in an era of brilliant book design (including this lovely, type-only cover for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah)."

But this trend doesn't only affect books about Africa. There are other examples, such as the obsession with veils on Arabic literature, as denounced by M Lynx Qualey on her blog Arabic Literature, where she cites a talk by academic Adam Talib: "Publishers, Talib said, can sometimes package books for bigots. This packaging might be one reason why readers leap to particular conclusions about an author’s narrative. On the other hand, Talib added, he doesn’t necessarily 'blame' the publishers, as he also wants to get translated Arabic literature out to a wide audience, and this might be one way to do it."

This sparked the appearance of other examples on Twitter, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's UK editions, "soulful-black-woman-with-colourful-smudges":

We've got another example from a reader who recently spotted a new phenomenon in English-language publishing in southeast Asia. He calls it "Asian sleaze", as he explained in our Tips, links and suggestions blog:

There is a peculiar phenomenon in English-language publishing in Southeast Asia: a ubiquitous genre perhaps best thought of as “Asian sleaze”. It spans fiction and non-fiction, but the cover generally features a partially clothed woman with long black hair, either in silhouette, or viewed from behind. The title is usually something along the lines of Bangkok Velvet. The author is always a white man.

Have you come across examples of these clichés? Or can you think of any other subjects that always get the same designs? Share your examples now by clicking on one of the blue ‘contribute’ buttons or, if you’re out and about, you can download the GuardianWitness app on your smartphone. We'll include the best submissions in a gallery on the Guardian site.

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