tragic life stories- from cover imagery

this blog post in creative review website interests me in terms of how you are judging a book by its cover to buy it, and the generic use of photographic imagery (small, often open eyed child, scrawled handwriting) to convey the brand of 'tragic life stories' from the image above(taken from the blog post)- the brand of conveying an emotion, setting the scene for the tragic contents. the jilly cooper book covers have changed greatly, lots of sideways glances.