Why Graphic Designers Can Be Your Worse Nightmare!
There is no doubt about it:
cover art design is very important because a bad design can kill book sales. However,
the best designed cover, even one that has won awards for the artist, can also
kill book sales.
The lesson here is that you
should not turn over your marketing to artists or designers.
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Excellent: what you see
is what you
get cover.
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Artists worry about ‘the look’.
Marketing people worry about the selling power of the cover art. Artists may
put type where it is almost impossible to read -- if it looks good. Artists
will sometimes fight putting graphic elements in a cover that while they will sell the book
will also lessen the aesthetic appeal of the artwork. Many artists want to
create covers that look great, win awards, and enhance their portfolios. That’s
very good for them but not necessarily good for their clients. (I’m speaking with
decades of experience here.)
How to Look at a Book Cover.
I believe it is best to view a
book cover as a gestalt ‘moving picture’. The reader sees the cover in stages.
First, there is the instant initial
impression. What is the cover about? Does the cover attract the right prospects
– those are the readers who are most likely to buy and read the book? Or does
the cover drive the best prospects away? A cover can do that. Even a beautiful
award winning cover can drive away the best prospects while attracting non buyers. Does the cover create a favorable impression or a negative
one? All this is happening in the reader’s mind in just a few seconds.
Second: in what order is the
copy read? The reader is most likely to read the biggest type first – that is, unless
a clever artist has hidden the biggest type in the overall graphic design. Ideally,
you want the reader to read the type in the preferred order. For example: small
type above a large type newspaper headline is often never read at all by
readers of that story. Thus type is not always read from top to bottom in the order it appears.The order in which the reader is going to read the type
should be the order which best conveys your selling message. This is
intelligent design.
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Excellent: what you see
is what you
get cover.
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Readers See in Stages.
Readers see the cover art in
stages. If you are a big name author, like Nora Roberts, you want your name to
stand out and be read first. A plain red
cover with just the words “Nora Robert’s New Book” set in very large type would
probably sell very well. A very famous author is the brand. If you are lesser known
author, then what kind of book it is should stand out at once. The cover should
scream: “This is a book for you reader!!!
This is just the kind of book you love reading!”
As far as reasonable, the
artwork should put ‘the goodies’ on the table for the reader to see at once. If
the book is a romance, it should look like a romance. If it is in a beautiful
location that readers would love to visit, then that location should be on the cover. If
the story features a garden and two little kids, that garden and those kids
need to be on the cover. Perhaps there even needs to be a sailboat and lighthouse in
the background. What you are doing here is ‘showing’ the reader that the elements
that she likes to see in this kind of story are indeed in this particular book.
Test Your Book Cover Art!
It is a wise procedure to
test your covers on typical readers. Here’s how:
Show the cover to the reader
for just three seconds. Then take the cover away and ask these questions:
1. What do you know about this book from what you just saw?
Can you tell me its genre? Is it a contemporary or historical? Is it Christian fiction?
2. Where is the setting for
this book?
3. Who wrote the book? Do you
know the author? Did you even notice the author’s name?
4. What is the title? From
the title can you tell what the book is about?
5. From what you just saw in
those few seconds, would you spend more time looking at the cover to learn more
about the book or would you move on and look at a different book?
The Cover Art is About
Marketing and Not Art Per se.
The job of a book cover is
to get your selling message across in just a few seconds. Being beautiful is
wonderful if the cover does that but to a marketing person cover art is ugly
to the extent it does not do that.
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Excellent: what you see
is what you
get cover.
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The key to making cover art
sell books is creating a design that instantly attracts the favorable attention
of those prospects who are most likely to buy the book -- if they knew of
the book’s existence -- and do this in a way that graphical lays the most
‘goodies’ (marketing vitamins) on display -- while at the same time being consistent
with the graphic limitations of the medium. Sometimes you can't do everything you'd like to do.
Important: When you do your
cover art test show the artwork in the same size and format as it will see when
it is in use. In other words, don’t show the reader a 8”10” blowup of the cover art for the test.
I’ve had to battle artists for
years, decades even, and sometimes I have to remind them that commercial art is
not beautiful or creative unless it sells the product.
Well Designed Covers That Told
Me Little
I recently saw a series of
well designed book covers that told me very little about what the books were
about. For example, I could not tell what genre the books were. I could not
tell if the books were mainstream, mystery, suspense, woman’s fiction or
romance. I could also not tell if they were contemporary or if they took place
in the 1930’s. One of the covers had a ‘cinema noir’ look which made me think
it was a period mystery but I don’t know if that was the case.
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Excellent: what you see
is what you
get cover.
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The thing here is that there was
nothing graphically wrong with these covers – (except that some of the type was
obscured by the artwork.) The artwork was very good which makes the book look
professional and thus likely to have been well edited. However there was
very little marketing directed at attracting the attention of the best
prospects for these books. (At least none I could see.)
Artists will tell you: “As
long as the cover is creative and attractive, people will pick it up and read
the back blurb to find out more about the book. That’s why there are back
blurbs.”
And some people will do just
this because the cover did strike their fancy. Many of these will read the back
blurb and decide it is not a book for them. In the meantime many good prospects
for the book will have passed the cover by because they 'know' what they are
looking for and when they see a cover that offers them that, they go right to it. As an author you want your book to be the one that the best prospects go directly to when they see many different books displayed in a bookstore or on a website.
In marketing today you really
can’t afford to let the best prospects, who would most likely buy your product if they
knew it existed, fail to notice your product for what it is when they are looking right at it.
I’d like to leave you with my
favorite slogan from the Leo Burnett advertising agency:
“It’s not creative if it doesn’t sell.”
