Rick Warren’s New Book Cover Contest

September 21st, 2009 by Nick Ciske

If you haven’t heard/read about Rick Warren’s contest to design his new book cover, well, it’s too late (the content ended Saturday).

From the press release:

Grand Rapids, Mich., September 17, 2009 — 99designs.com, the largest marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design, last night announced that best-selling author Rick Warren is running an open design project for the cover of his new book, The Hope You Need: from The Lord’s Prayer, to be published by Zondervan. Since that announcement, the website is being flooded with designs.

“As of 11 a.m. East Coast time today, 327 designs have been submitted to the website,” said Steve Sammons, Zondervan’s Executive Vice President of Consumer Engagement. ”We’re announcing this morning that the winning design will now receive $5,000 rather than the original $3,000.”

The Hope You Need: from The Lord’s Prayer, scheduled for hardcover release on November 17, was inspired by a sermon series Warren taught at Saddleback Church in Orange County, CA. It invites readers to plug into the unparalleled power that exists within the words of the best-known prayer on the planet. With his classic approachability, passion and candor, Warren will provide helpful insight and much-needed inspiration for reviving whatever seems to be dying in life.

The final tally: 3189 designs.

There’s a lot of debate (resulting in a very heated dialogue) going on about this being spec work, which many people and organizations feel is bad for both clients and companies, but I won’t get into that here.

I’d like to talk about the practical implications of this, and why it’s probably a bad idea for anyone to mimic this publicity stunt.

It’s Rick Warren — attach his name to anything and you will have some amount of success. You are not Rick Warren.
The prize was $5,000. You can get a professionally designed cover for much less — and you get to work directly with the cover designer. Offering a smaller reward would likely get you some entries, but not the number Rick did.
- Side note: If you were one of the most successful authors of modern times and had signed an exclusive deal with Zondervan to publish your next book, why would you fork over $3,000 of your own money for a cover design contest? Zondervan would have hired a professional designer and paid the bill!
Speaking of the number of entries… would you rather: sift through hundreds (or thousands) of cliche, poorly designed book cover concepts (many of which couldn’t follow simple instructions like the trim size) or 2-3 high quality concepts? There are a few decent covers in the pile, but it’s definitely entered “needle in a haystack” territory. Some of the entries are intentional jokes… while others are just terrible.
- One cover is supposed to be of a person kneeling in prayer, but the focus is on the, uh, lower front of the mans torso. Imagine that face out at your local Christian bookstore!
There’s no guarantee you’ll get concepts from a Christian cover designer. If your book deals with abstract spiritual concepts the results could be comical or downright offensive.
If you pick a winning entry — will that designer be able to produce press ready files or will you need to pay extra for that?

I could go on, but you get the point: there’s little added value to a contest like this, and in this case, the price tag was higher. Of course, the exposure the book received was priceless, but it hadn’t been Rick Warren, it wouldn’t have been newsworthy.

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Nick Ciske

Nick Ciske is the co-founder of Believers Press and has been developing web sites in various capacities for over ten years. After a five year stint at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association he ended up at Bethany Press International. Now a book geek, he helps Christians publish their books by creating new publishing solutions and partnerships.

Posted in Design, Engaging Culture, Publishing, Traditional Royalty Publishing

One Response to “Rick Warren’s New Book Cover Contest”

Charles Brock says:

September 21, 2009 at 10:02 am

This whole thing is just sad to me. I would lay money that none of the covers submitted will actually be the final printed cover. They might award the prize but from what I’ve seen I can’t imagine Zondervan would allow any of those on a Rick Warren book. This kind of thing “is” spec work and it’s sad that Warren would take advantage of all these people for his own publicity. The history of 99designs is not good. If you follow up on many of their contests, they often never pick a winner and don’t award the prize. All who put on, promote and participate in these things do not value design or the talent and time put into good design.