Novel set in COPENHAGEN at Christmas
Should we judge a book by its cover?
16th June 2022
Matthew Smith
Oh gosh, what a question. I could spend hours debating this one (buy me a pint or two and we will) but I’ve only got 1,000 words so here goes.
The simple answer is yes, and not simply because impassioned publishers and designers pour so much creative angst into every cover. When you’re presented with over 30 million books on sites like Amazon, and first impressions of a title are created by a 2-inch square jpeg, the cover matters more than ever. Great cover designs need to draw the reader’s attention, engage them, suggest the genre and style of the work, and emphasise the quality of the book itself, while taking into consideration the potential cultural expectations of the reader and/or region. This is a monumental task and can often be a deciding factor in helping make a book a best-seller – or even sell at all.
On the simplest level, they are a visual sales pitch, and every aspect needs to be spot on. If the concept is not clear enough from a distance (say on a table in a bookshop amongst many other titles), or when the image is a thumbnail online, then a great book will be lost on a potential customer. If the font is illegible, unprofessional, or overly used (hello Comic Sans and Papyrus fonts), it will turn off the reader.
The cover gives an immediate sense of the book’s genre, communicating for example whether it’s crime fiction, a thriller, romance or perhaps a memoir or self-help text. The publisher may not be expecting to make a deep emotional connection with the potential reader at this stage but will certainly be hoping they take a closer look.
However, a cover can also create preconceptions in a reader’s mind about the style or approach of the book. Some publishers actually do this specifically to ‘connect’ their books, not just to similar titles in their own catalogue (hello Bookouture) but to existing bestsellers. These designs can come in trends, whether it’s every new psychological thriller having a splash of stark and vibrant yellow somewhere in the design, a woman/man running in silhouette, or a forbidding looking house/shack in a desolate landscape – you’ll notice these everywhere now! And I guarantee we’ll soon have a slew of Richard Osman lookie-likies – similar book covers, not very tall people in glasses.
A well-designed cover is also the first assurance the reader has that the book is likely of a high quality, both in content and physically. Poor covers, with pixelated images, watermarks clearly visible, text badly formatted, overused free ‘stock’ imagery, or haphazardly too ‘busy’, suggest to the reader that the contents and story will be equally poor. Many books that are often rather unfairly labelled as self-published (that’s a whole other article!!), are actually traditionally published titles with poor cover design.
Even with experience and the best of publishing intentions, it is easy to get it wrong. Or at least get it wrong from a commercial point of view. Let me give you an example. The first book I published with indie Urbane was Adrian Harvey’s Being Someone, a moving novel about a relationship. Being the launch title for the company the novel meant a huge amount and as a complex and compelling slice of literary fiction I wanted to do it justice. In what I thought was a rather cool idea at the time, I found a piece of appropriate contemporary art to use in the design (one of the protagonists was an art dealer), and we launched the book in a funky art gallery. So far, so good – we even appeared in Tatler no less! But despite being an absolutely cracking story sales were slow. I petitioned WHSmith relentlessly to get them to stock it, and in the end the buyer told me they loved the story but hated the cover. So, I created a whole new print run with a more … commercially acceptable … cover. Lo and behold the novel was selected for the Fresh Talent prize, selling over 5000 copies. Even after 20 years of publishing books I still had much to learn! It was an example of completely overthinking the creative process and not focusing on developing a cover that would effectively position and sell the book. Because no matter how great the design concept, it’s pointless if it can’t attract readers. The same book is now published by Bloodhound and they have changed the cover again with a very different concept – all three are below. Which is your favourite?
What this showed of course is that the biggest issue in designing covers is … people. Because believe me, when you start the cover development process, from initial concept to finished proof, every single person even remotely linked to the book suddenly has an opinion. Everyone becomes an expert and a critic. I’ve had everything from ‘I’ve heard purple is the ‘IN’ colour this year’ to ‘will people be offended by the positioning of the banana?’ People think they’re on safe ground with covers, because it is all about ‘what they like’. But it’s a far more nuanced and complex process than that. Publishers even have to consider the book’s production process – firstly because covers can be very, very expensive to create (many publishers now template covers to save costs – much to my horror) and what you have on the cover can affect schedules. There are, for example, thousands of copies of a book on Chinese history sitting in Shanghai after being impounded by the government enroute from the Chinese printer. Why? Because the cover was a picture of Mao Tse Tung.
So next time you’re browsing in your favourite bookshop, have a think about what covers you like and why. Forget the popular idiom ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, because consciously or not, every time you look at a book you’re already doing it. From the carefully crafted strapline to the use of that rather cool embossing, a publisher and designer have crafted something they hope will capture hearts and minds – and your hard-earned money….
Matthew Smith
Read about, EXPRIMEZ, Matthews’s literary consultancy here.
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What a great post and from such an interesting perspective, given the conversations I regularly have about this very issue, with my fellow readers/reviewers.
I have always maintained that I try not to judge a book by its cover. However I have to agree with Matthew, that we probably all do just that, albeit unconsciously. Although for me personally, the book title also needs to grab my attention and draw me in. It is only then that I will actually spend time reading the premise, which will quickly ‘turn me off’ if it contains either too few, or too many ‘spoilers’.
I recognise completely the observations Matthew made about a certain named publisher, with whom I regularly work on Blog Tours, not only in relation to the way in which they ‘group’ their book covers, but also in the formulaic way in which they title their books, so much so that both cover and title literally ‘do what they say on the tin’. Not always to my liking, but then my copies are complimentary and I am being asked to review the storyline and nothing more than that!
In fact, only very occasionally will I comment about a book cover as part of my review and that is when it is either particularly eye-catching, or of important relevance to the storyline or content.
As for the book which Matthew featured in his post, I really would associate the title with the original image. However, read the premise and I can see exactly why WH Smith wanted the cover changed for the second option. The third option doesn’t really gel for me in conjunction with either the title or premise!
Thank You 🙂