You Can't Tell A Book By Its Cover - Or Can You?

By George Kittredge

A Midwest book review company reports that they receive over 1500 book titles per month or about 50 per day. The company employs 76 reviewers.

When the books come in they are placed in three stacks.

• Stack #1 are for those books to be reviewed because they appear "appealing".
• Stack #2 are those books that "perhaps" a volunteer reviewer might be willing to look at (I guess that means that they are not as appealing).
• And stack #3 (can you say uuuuuuuuugly) are for those books that are rejected because they have poorly designed and unattractive covers "that look like they came from an amatuer drawing class."

So how important is your cover? It's everything.

It's a cover that is going to make a book reviewer, or anyone who is considering your book, pick it up in the first place. A reseller will buy your book only if they don't think their readers will pick it up. And readers won't pick it up unless it attracts them.

And when you are in a book store or book department of a grocery store, what books catch your eye and prompt you to pick them up? Yup, it's their covers.

Think of it this way. Proctor and Gamble spends millions of dollars to make sure that the cover (i.e. packaging) is as appealing and distinctive as it can possibly be. They realize that the competition if fierce and they look at every aspect of their products to identify possible advantages. The design of their packaging is a very important piece of their overall marketing strategy.

To you bookwriters. You just spent a lot of time creating the content for your book. Don't shortchange and shortcircuit yourself by not spending time selecting the right artwork, color, design and words that will go on the front and back covers. It's the most important element to get your book noticed.

Who says you can't tell a book by its cover? A cover will tell you a lot...

...And the difference may mean stack #1 as opposed to stack #3.