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Book cover designers are being hampered by not having title information, delegates at The Bookseller's Cover Design seminar heard.
At the event held on Thursday (21st May) Damian Horner, founder of Mustoes and publishing marketing consultant, said: "It's frankly scandalous. I don't think you can ever design a cover without having some idea of what the title might be—yet it happens all the time."
Horner stressed the importance of a book title. To illustrate this he called Birdsong a bad title as it does not explain what the book is about. On the other hand he labeled Confessions of a Shopaholic a good title as "you don't even need to see the cover to know what the book is about". Horner said that if the title was bad then the designer was "handicapped from the very beginning". He added: "The title is an integral part of the communication and it needs to be dissected in the same way we do the visuals."
Little, Brown creative director, Duncan Spilling, said it was "criminal" for a designer to work on a book without a title. He added that it wastes both time and money. The seminar was held at the Bloomsbury hotel in London.