Let me own upfront to a bias—I am not the kind of reader who puts great stock in covers and cover designs. I tend to look at this as the legacy of having been a library kid. A great many of the books I devoured up through college had been re-covered in “library bindings” in particularly unappetizing (though sturdy!) shades of dull greens and browns. When I started buying books—strictly used, at first—I was never discouraged by covers that were out of date, damaged, or missing entirely, if the book was one I wanted. And I am by nature a little less interested, broadly, in trends and fashions (as opposed to, say, constants and standards), and cover designs have been driven by trends and fashions for decades. I like to shed books’ dust jackets when I’m reading them, though I habitually preserve them rather than discard them all together.
As a publisher, though, I look at covers as an essential part of the publishing process—though one I maybe sometimes begrudge for its outsize prominence in the retail sales effort. Covers are a much bigger deal in US publishing (and in the UK) than they are in continental Europe or East Asia, for example, where it’s not uncommon to see novels emblazoned with a monochrome photo of the (usually unsmiling) author’s face. I’ve got to admit, I love that kind of cover. I also love the plain text treatment—the plainer the better. I am envious of those presses like Fitzcarraldo that make their way using straight uniform cover designs. The branding is brilliant. NYRB Classics, same. And of course, everyone’s still gaga over the old Vintage Contemporaries line, and who doesn’t appreciate the Penguin Classic look?
What follows here are some only-semi-organized notes on book covers from a publisher’s perspective. These are offered in contrast to what authors might think about covers. I have seen some authors (not all of course) get a little overcommitted to the book cover as an integral expression of their book—rather than as a more ephemeral though still very important element in helping that book find and appeal to readers. If these notes help some authors inclined that way to think differently, I hope it might help those authors and their publishers find productive common ground on the cover front.
1. Publishers tend to see covers, in the broadest sense, less as an expression of the work and more as a tool to serve specific purposes at retail.
2. Covers can be considered as having a branding purpose for the book as a commercial item—to that extent, the cover should complement the work.
3. A bad cover can turn off readers, but readers motivated to buy the work by what they’ve previously learned about it will be indifferent to the cover.
4. It’s unlikely any cover design will entice a reader who doesn’t know anything else about the book to buy it.
5. Covers are probably more important to retailers, in terms of decisions to make about what books to stock, than they are to reviewers or readers.
6. It’s probably a mistake to over-identify any one cover design with the work—the most successful books, which is to say those that sell over the longest period of time and are published in multiple different formats, editions, and languages, have the greatest variety of different cover designs.
7. The more successful the work, and the more covers it’s given in different editions, the more clear it is that those covers are chosen specifically to appeal to the different audiences those editions are pointed to.
8. Retailers, because of the sheer volume of books they carry, tend to favor covers that clearly express messages they see as expected by a book’s target audience—romance covers, fantasy covers, cookbook covers, and business covers all tend to resemble the covers of other books in their category.
9. As such, covers function as signifiers to both retailers and consumers that a given book with a given cover will meet their broader expectations.
10. Retailers tend not to favor books with cover designs that don’t meet those expectations.
11. Thus, it's a good idea to survey the covers of comparable titles, to understand how and why they work as they do—though this is not the end-all, be-all of cover design.
12. Photos of authors on front covers tend not to be favored unless the author is a celebrity.
13. In terms of digital retail cover considerations, cover designs with clearly legible imagery and type function much better at the small “thumbnail” size encountered on those websites than covers with more elaborate, detailed designs
14. Covers with the above digital-retail-friendly qualities also have the benefit of being easily legible in a bricks and mortar store.
15. We’ve learned at Agate that a cover/jacket design has a few crucial purposes in terms of stimulating the behavior of every potential purchaser of a book in a store who didn’t come in specifically looking for that book (obviously other considerations apply at digital retail):
a. It should prompt the purchaser to pick up the book.
b. It should prompt the purchaser to turn the book over to look at the copy on the back.
c. It should prompt the purchaser to open the book and look at the info on any flyleaves or other key places for info pointed at purchaser.
At bottom, I feel if a cover does the above, it’s met its key purpose. If a cover/jacket doesn’t prompt these behaviors, it’s unlikely that the purchaser will take it to the register. And if a cover turns off retailers, it will never get in front of most purchasers.
A word about vision, design, and expression—a good cover can be beautiful and also truly capture what a book is about, though it’s unlikely that any one design can express every aspect of a work—books are lengthy and complex experiences and covers are meant to be more immediately intelligible. But I think anyone trying to develop a good cover for a book shouldn’t simply focus on realizing those qualities without being informed by key comp titles in its category. I recommend to our authors (who we tend to give a big voice in cover design, though not final approval) that they survey the comp landscape and figure out what sorts of things appeal to them, or turn them off, about various comps—always keeping in mind the points I raise above about retailer expectations. If a cover is beautiful and expressive of the author’s vision, but does not appeal to retailers, it may be failing in one of its key purposes.
Ideally, a cover design will be expressive of the author’s vision of the work *and* effective at retail, and with every potential audience to which it might appeal. Everybody wins! But I don’t think there’s any such thing as “perfect” cover design that meets every ambition of an author and fulfills every expectation of the retail community, any more than I believe each human has an individual “soul mate” among the 8 billion or so other people here on the planet with them.
This was so interesting! And it made me think of my covers in a new way. I've never seen these insights shared before, but they make a lot of sense. Thanks for this.
Thanks for this, Doug. I found 5 particularly interesting. I honestly thought it was about the readers. What do you think shapes retailers’ expectations?