Book Covers as Packaging in the New Marketing Environment

When deciding whether a cover design is right for your book, as with any product package you’re first asking a couple of important questions:

1. Does it accurately represent the contents?
2. Does it engage customers emotionally? Make them want to pick it up, turn it over, flip through it, find out what’s inside?

Good questions, but there are others to ask too. Does it look new? Contemporary? Fresh? As in all categories of design, fashion, automotive, architecture etc., what’s new is appealing, and what looks “new” is defined by a balance between trendiness and originality. So typefaces, color palettes, ways of rendering photos and images will need to fit in with other books currently making an impact, and yet have something fresh and different about them. That’s the task and the joy of a book designer, to find a perfect balance between fashion and originality while faithfully representing the contents of your book.

But there’s another key category, more important now than ever. Marketing. Where will the book be sold? How will it be promoted? Answers to these questions will increasingly drive cover design trends. For example, a traditional measure of a book title treatment in the past was often whether it could be read and would “pop” on a store shelf 10-20 feet away. So titles got huge…”wall-to-wall type” was the publisher’s request, and the blockbuster look was born. Then, in reaction to that—in recognition that out of the screaming throng of titles on a bookstore shelf, sometimes “small and understated” actually stands out from the crowd—a new trend was born, the sophisticated, simple, understated use of type and other elements. We now see that everywhere.

However, as books are sold more and more on the internet, with covers viewed on smaller and smaller screens, I think we’re going to see a design trend back to bigger and bolder titles and graphics. Titles now need to stand out in an Amazon lineup presented at low resolution 1 1/2 inches high! Particularly for self-publishers, if a cover doesn’t work at that size, it’s probably not going to work. Something to think about.

Receive "Tips from the Experts" in your email inbox

Sign up for the BelieversPress email newsletter today.

Related Posts

• Elements of a Successful Publishing Project
• Publishing 2.0
• What is inside comes out on the page
• 5 Keys to Great Fiction Book Covers
• 3 Things to Leave Out of Your Author Bio

Terry Dugan
Dugan Design Group

Terry Dugan is a book lover and book designer. Books are our medium, our passion, and our continuing fascination. Christian book cover and book design has been our primary business for a long time, and we have created hundreds of covers in every category for publishers around the country and around the world.

Posted in Design, Marketing, Trends, Uncategorized

Comments are closed.