Another stepping stone

 This week’s topic is cover design, which I know nothing about so you should be able to get on with whatever you were doing in short order.

When you go to the book store, what makes you pick up a book? The cover! 

 

Covers are a marketing device. Like the headline on a news story in the papers (geez, am I dating myself? Anyone still read newspapers?) a cover’s purpose is to make you pick up the book. And let's be honest people, once you have a book in your hand, it can be really hard to put it back on the shelf.

 

Someone once told me she bought a certain brand of dog food because the bag was pretty. See what I mean—marketing. The product on the shelf caught her eye and when her brain started making positive associations between the sparkly pink bag (like seriously sparkly, like a five-year-old's princess-themed birthday party sparkly), it automatically formed a positive association about the quality of food inside. She couldn’t get out her money fast enough. (Forty years of reading dog food labels later, I think we’ve moved past that method of decision making but still, case in point.)

 

When I shop for books by a specific author, I don’t care what’s on the cover design. It’s just icing on the cake. I know John Sandford and Diana Gabaldon and AJ Pearce are going to deliver. But when I wander off into the misty regions of unknown (to me) authors, my hands pick up what my eyes like. 

 

The cover for “Ghost” is currently in the hands of a designer who has not read the book. Don’t panic (says the woman who is routinely panicking about everything connected to publishing this book). This is normal. She doesn’t NEED to read the book. The publisher told her what it was about. Her job is to make YOU want to read the book.

 

To date, I’ve seen one initial mockup for the cover. I liked the type font for the title. Then I went off and quietly had a panic attack. Not to worry. It’s early days. I need more emotional support coffee.

 

Book covers represent the genre of the pages between them. A cover showing a couple walking hand-in-hand along a rainy boulevard in Paris is not likely to be a story about an axe murderer. (Well, it could. But it probably won't.) A cover showing a woman drinking a latte from a to-go cup and talking on her phone as she walks under a ladder with a guy balanced precariously atop is probably not going to be high courtroom drama. 

 

The cover’s sole purpose is to catch the reader’s eye, along with giving you an idea of what to expect inside. And to display the title and the author’s name, but honestly, if you’re a visual person like me, you see the picture first: the cat in the window, silhouetted against a fireplace, or the long, desolate farm lane leading to a house and barn in the distance. Those images make me want to read the book. They are also responsible for my current TBR pile, which I had to recently re-engineer because someone was going to get hurt when (not if) it fell over.

 

There is a caveat. I remember a book I read and loved a number of years ago. The cover showed a young woman wearing an old-fashioned nightgown looking over her shoulder with an expression of terror as she fled barefoot from a castle in the night. I read the entire book, waiting for that scene to take place. It never did. Namely because there was no castle in the story. And the setting was in the 1980s so not many young women were wearing old-fashioned white nightgowns. I suspect the book had been subjected to a stock cover, something slapped on by a publisher who thought—like horseshoes and hand grenades—it was close enough to count. 

 But the point of the cover was to make me get out my wallet. And it worked.

 

Thanks for sharing this journey with me. No idea what’s on deck for next week. I’m headed to the All-Iowa Writers Conference this weekend, harvest is inching ever closer and Raider and I are taking a few weeks off from the show ring to work through some training issues. If Raider wrote a book, I have no doubt the cover art would show a dog frolicking merrily about the ring while the handler throws up her hands in defeat and the judge wonders WTH is going on.