How People Judge a Book By Its Cover

 

by Richard Risemberg

 

If your work is to be produced by a trade publisher, the cover will be entirely out of your hands. This can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing: good, because it is by no means easy to design and produce a good cover; bad, because you may get stuck with a bad one. In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway notes how he felt that the original cover to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was awful, looking like something designed for a cheap sci-fi potboiler–and later mentions Scott’s complaints that the book wasn’t selling well. Fitzgerald was a popular and successful author at the time.

As a self-published author you have an entirely different worry: there’s no one to blame it on but yourself if your cover is terrible and holds back sales of the book. Because, let’s face it, despite the ancient maxim that “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” most people do just that. The veracity of the maxim shall remain unchallenged; however, people will persist in behavior that flouts its wisdom. We have all read great books with bad covers, and vice versa. But good covers do sell books.

So what should you do?

The sad answer is, spend money. And not just on a cover design. Unless you are extraordinarily lucky, and have access to experienced book design professionals who either owe you a favor or whom you have dirt on, you will have to pay for:

  • Editing. You must employ the services of a trained professional editor, one who does not love you. More on this in my earlier article, Get Thee to an Editor.”
  • Proofreading. Editors are not always the best proofreaders; their attention is focused on story and sentence structure. A practiced proofreader is pretty important. Goofs and typos should have no place in your story.
  • The cover. As we mentioned above, the cover is of paramount importance in selling your book.

Related: Find editing and proofreading services here.


 

Your cover must be:

  1. Eye-catching. This is obvious.
  2. Pertinent. It should refer to the actual story, though. oddly and sadly, this is not quite so important. The story (if you’ve done your job) will tell itself.
  3. Versatile. With so many book sales taking place online these days, it is vital that your cover look good at thumbnail size. (I speak from experience here, I am sorry to say.)
  4. Technically correct. It should be compatible with the printing process of your self-publishing company. (I used a relative who has cover design experience, but we discovered that images that looked good in Photoshop and could be printed beautifully on magazine cover stock would lose so much contrast on the stock my publisher uses that they became bland.)

Once all this is done, and the book produced, you can begin marketing it. Again, look for–and pay for–professional help. It’s a noisy world out there. You must be sure you are heard. But that’s a topic for another post, somewhere down the line.

 

 

 

Alternately titled A Book by Its Cover.

Guest post contributed by Richard Risemberg. Richard was dragged to Los Angeles as a child, and has been working there in a number of vernacular occupations since his teens while writing poetry, articles, essays, and fiction, and editing online ‘zines. He’s survived long enough to become either a respected elder or a tedious old fart, depending on your point of view, and is still at it. You can learn about his own novels at Crow Tree Books.

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9 thoughts on “How People Judge a Book By Its Cover

  1. Money, money and more money! Richard, I just wrote an article similar to this myself.

    As an off-topic, I like that bit about you being dragged to Los Angeles as a child, lol.

    Like

  2. I agree. A great cover gets attention and sales. I had a great cover on my novel. Everyone remarked about it. They would pick up the book, look at the print size, set the book down quickly and walk away. I lost count of the “I can’t read that” exclamations I heard. The publishers printed my book in a 9 font. Who’s that stupid! I plan to rewrite a few places and have it republished by someone who knows what they’re doing. Bad thing is I can’t use the same cover.

    Like

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