I’m finishing up a short book on customer data platforms. It’ll be available soon, so stay tuned.
Part of that process is creating the right cover. A cover can make or break a book.
How should I go about it?
Here are five approaches.
- Go with my gut. That appeals to my ego, but I’m self-aware enough to know that I don’t have an artist’s eye. Back when I wore ties to work, I would have preferred to have someone else pick my tie for me. I’m not horrible at it, but some people see things in a way that I don’t. They have that knack.
- Ask some friends. I have smart friends, and I’m sure many of them have better instincts than I do about such things. But they’re not experts on book covers, so while their guidance is helpful, I’m not sure that’s enough of an upgrade.
- Consult an expert. If I get the right one, with the right experience and instincts for my market, that would be great. But I’m not sure how to find that person, and I don’t want to spend that kind of money.
- Duplicate the style of similar book covers. There’s a lot of sense in that. The old saying is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but everyone judges books by their covers all the time. We have expectations for different genres. You don’t expect a business book to have a fantasy dragon on the cover.
Within that general concept, you have to have a sense of your target audience and what they would prefer. That’s hard to gauge, but it’s worth thinking about. For example, should you be more on the playful side or the serious side?
- Try a few things and test them. This appeals to my marketing operations background. Also, it doesn’t really matter what I think, or what my friends think, or what an expert thinks. It matters what the market thinks.
I am going to test some covers, but I still have to choose what to test. I can’t try 600 different covers, so I have to go with some combination of the ideas above and narrow it down to just a couple.
Here’s what I’m doing. I don’t share this because I’m an expert. I’m not. I’m sharing this so you can think through the issues and come up with your own ideas – your own mix of these concepts.
I don’t want to defy genre expectations, but business book covers are boring. I want to be close to the edge of the genre expectation – without breaking it.
It’s important to think about colors and typography, and what moods they evoke. I’m a man, so I see the world in Windows 16 colors, so I lean on my cover designer for color decisions. I’ll give a link to her below. She’s very good.
If you’re going to have more than one book, you want to maintain some sort of brand consistency. You want a design that you can copy – at least to some extent – so the books are recognizable as coming from your brand.
Consider formats and sizes. People will be seeing your cover in a lot of different settings. You want to make sure the text is readable and the images work no matter where they see your cover. Sometimes that’ll be a thumbnail on a very small screen.
The elephant in the room here is the book title, which is probably more important than the cover, and which I haven’t discussed at all. A lot of these same concepts apply to the title as well as the cover design. For example, it would be nice to A/B test a book title.
If you’re designing a book cover, think about these issues, and let me know what you come up with.
Also, keep an eye out for my new book. You can let me know what you think of the cover, but I’m going to do a split test and pick the one that gets more clicks.
