The Bookseller.com

4th July 2009

Damian Horner was a founder of Mustoes advertising agency and is a freelance marketing consultant.

Defend the cover

14.04.08

Last week an editor at Orion showed me an extraordinary book cover. It was utterly arresting, beautifully simple and very memorable. Unfortunately, it may never see the light of the day.

The problem is that this cover breaks the "rules". It is for a crime novel but features no blood-red type or moody image of an empty street at night. That in itself might be forgivable but this cover not only breaks the genre rules, it also breaks those for books per se. Imagine this—it has no author name, no title and no snappy review.

The more cynical in the business might laugh at this point but, I assure you, this cover would stop a train in its tracks. It demands notice and that surely is its first job.

Nevertheless, you'll never see this cover because one or two key retailers don't like it. Put bluntly, they want something that looks more like all the other crime novels on the market.

This is a crippling issue for the book industry yet it is one that publishers seem to accept meekly. In fact, it's now commonplace for interesting covers not even to make it to a retailer presentation. Sales teams know from bitter experience that they will be rejected at the first hurdle.

The creative use of the book cover is one of the few variables publishers can manipulate to influence consumer behaviour. It is almost incumbent on them to be brave and inventive in order to grab book buyers' attention. The reality, however, is that they are hitting a brick wall. Retailers are calling the shots—stagnating the market by demanding covers that look just like the last bestseller.

This state of affairs has arisen because discussions about cover design are wholly subjective. No one knows best so, as gatekeepers to the market, the retailers get what they want. Rather than accepting this, publishers should see it as a wake-up call. Effectively, what retailers are saying is "We don't think you know your readers as well as we do". That's quite an insult.

There is only one way for publishers to regain the high ground in this relationship and that is by testing alternate covers and proving to retailers that they really do know what readers actually want.

Publishers baulk at the idea of cover research, claiming they don't have the budgets for it. Yet these are the same publishers who throw away thousands of pounds a year on covers that must be continually re-designed because retailers don't like them. Surely the time has come to rethink priorities?

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