A Cover Story

"You can't tell a book by its cover"--or can you? Book publishers certainly believe a book's cover is an important piece in the book-selling puzzle. Marketers want the cover to attract buyers, make them pick the book up, and hopefully buy the book. Editorial, of course, wants the same thing, but we also want the cover to artfully, attractively reflect the contents, the author's message.

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA), along with Dickinson Press, is offering awards for book cover design this fall. Discovery House submitted two of our favorite covers from the past year, and the one pictured above has made it to the finals in its category. We will find out whether it wins the award in November at the ECPA conference in Chicago. But it was pretty exciting to arrive at work on a dark, rainy Monday morning and receive the notification that our book was a finalist. It took a lot of hard work to get here from there.

Our book covers are usually designed before the book is even edited. For marketing and publicity purposes, we need the cover design long before we actually start working on the inside of the book. As with all of our books, our managing editor contacted a designer and gave him minimal information about the book (so he or she is free to come up with a concept without undue influence). The intended audience for the book is teenage to 20-something women, and the designer was aware of that. It deals with issues like modesty, self-image, and beauty from a biblical perspective. Several of us had settled on what we were convinced was a beautiful cover (and it was), but as it turned out, not the best cover for the book itself.

The first objection came from the author, who had an entirely different vision for the cover. Usually authors must live with their publishers choices, but we do try to take their preferences under advisement, and the author in this instance so disliked what we had chosen that she had a designer-friend create a cover herself. Of course this cover was unacceptable to us, so we took the author's concept back to the designer. Another interesting development was that the men on our marketing team who saw the cover that we were in love with, absolutely hated it.

But we were sure we were right. So the designer came up with some new designs for us to look at, including the one posted above. Most of us hated this cover, and the author wasn't extremely excited about it, but our managing editor, who found it not to her taste, believed that it would be a strong cover that would attract positive attention for the book. (And she reminded us of that today.)

Finally, one of our marketing people suggested that we have a small focus group that included about twelve young women who are on the RBC staff. What an interesting thing to observe! And the young women, hands down, chose this cover over what was apparently an "old lady" cover. It seems that they knew what they were talking about, because look what a long way this little cover has come.

And people think working for a publishing company must be boring! Stay posted for the results in November. . .