The Clean and Green Club

I was just beginning to think about what I’d write about this month when Jim Cox’s column crossed my desk. Jim has tons of good resources for authors and publishers on his https://www.midwestbookreview.com website and cheerfully gave me permission to reprint here.

Guest Column: Why Covers Matter
By Jim Cox, Editor, Midwest Book Review

I’ve had the pleasure of being one of the annual Audies Award judges for a good number of years now. But this year there was a new twist — most of the award categories were being offered to we judges as computer downloads instead of our assigned category audio book CDs arriving in the mails.

I don’t have a laptop computer that I can sit back in an easy chair with to listen to hours upon hours of audio book recordings. Neither am I familiar with iPods or whatever it is that is sticking out of the ears of so many young people these days. What I usually do is listen to the audio books I review (including those that I once-a-year annually rank and pass judgement upon) while I’m working at my desk, driving around in my car, taking long walks, or retiring to bed in the evening.

So this year I passed upon most of the categories and volunteered for one that I’d never had before: Package Design. Ranking and judging audio book submissions entirely upon how they looked.

I took an hour to go over the entries carefully and make preliminary notes on the pros & cons of their respective packaging. Quite a change from assessing their contents!

But it did prompt me to reflect on how important packaging is when it comes to the commercial viability of a book — any book, any genre, any category, any format — and any author!

Simply stated, people judge books by their covers. And by people, I mean far more than the general reading public browsing through a bookstore or a library trying to decide what they’d like to choose from all that is being offered them. I also mean book reviewers, wholesalers, distributers, retailers, and librarians who are faced with the same decision.

How very often I’ve seen a lot of an author’s labor go into the writing of a book only to have a poorly chosen cover or badly executed packaging design crush any chance at commercial success.

Authors getting published by the major conglomerates have very little say in what the art departments of a Random House or a Simon & Schuster determine the ‘packaging’ of their book will look like. Self-published authors have the sole say for what their book will look like. Between those two extreme points on the decision making scale are most of the small press published authors. So if you as an author are being published by a small or independent press, get involved in the decision making process to assure that your book will not be handicapped in the market place by flawed artistic concepts, inferior execution of design, or slip-shod attention to the thematic relevance of what the artwork will be with respect to the content of the book being packaged with it.

When it comes to books, the two reasons for a badly designed or poorly executed packing I most often encounter is that the author and/or publisher didn’t have the capital to invest to produce a professionally competitive cover, or that they had some friend or relative that dabbled in art and they felt obligated to oblige.

Please believe me — if you as an author or a publisher find the book packaging to be distasteful, or substandard the chances are that your otherwise prospective buyers will too.

Bottom line — Spend as much time an energy on the outside of your book as you did on the inside.