A book’s cover is the first way a reader interacts with a text. We may know the authors ahead of time, or heard a good review, but ultimately, a good cover seals the deal between a reader’s wallet and your words.

I’ve designed a few covers myself, and—more appropriately—I have paid actual graphic designers for their covers.

But occasionally, even a good design doesn’t hook an audience. When that happens, redoing a cover is necessary.

 

 

But how does one literally judge a book cover?

Does it need to be representative of the story? Does it need to be beautiful? As one of the most famous cover designers in the world, Chip Kidd, whose work on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is iconic, has said,

“A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.”

In that vein, Paper Lantern Writers has found that our third short story anthology, Destiny Comes Due, was not connecting with readers. Our sales were less than robust, and tellingly, even when we advertised, no one would click. Not a single one.
So we did what professionals do: we analyzed the data, tried a different marketing strategy to confirm our suspicions, and then realized something had to change.

What wasn’t working?

The way books sell today is by thumbnail image. If you are a big author whose publishing house has a budget set aside for just your book, you can have an intricate design and subtle colors. The rest of us? We need to signal our readers fast and hard with an image that is somewhere between 400 and 800 pixels. That’s not easy.

It’s why many romance novels have a naked man chest on their covers: it’s a signal to the readers to expect a sexy, open door love story. Even if there isn’t such a blatant message, each genre has its own trends to garner vews. Trends work because readers learn what a certain cover means. However, authors whose covers say one thing and the manuscript another can find themselves roasted in online reader spaces.
For us, our old cover had a white line down the middle, with an overall gold/brown color palette. We determined that this cover, when looked at from a thumbnail size, the white line made it look as if the image hadn’t loaded correctly. And in today’s market, full of lush, intricate romantasy covers, our gold/brown colors was a 1970s shag rug in a world of saturated digital editing.

Next, we looked at current trends for historical fiction as well as the overall market.

Destiny Comes Due was written from a need to see evil punished. While it is darker in tone than our other collections, the reader knows from the title that each villain suffers their comeuppance. In each of our ten stories, justice prevails.
Yet, our stories hail from around the globe and centuries. How do we portray that? How do we discuss a concept of karma, deus ex machina, fate, punishment? We had to start at square one, so we chose our colors first.
The color green is associated with the older ideas of the supernatural in Western culture, like Gawain and the Green Knight, and the European folklore of “The Green Man” or “The Wild Man.” We decided this would be an appropriate for our dominant color, and wanted a saturated jewel tone to catch the eye in the 400-800 pixel rendition. There is a current trend for borders, so we added that, in gold, to portray richness and balance the jewel-toned green.

I liked the artwork of a medieval-style Justice tarot card. C.V. Lee found a raven to add, a divine symbol in many cultures. Jonathan Posner and Anne Beggs both contributed editorial advice, font suggestions, and even color-adjustment skills.
We presented our work to the rest of the Paper Lanterns, and our reasoning why. They agreed, and we uploaded the cover. Within days, we had our first success! Without advertising, we had our first sale in three months.

If you haven’t read the collection yet, I hope you are enticed to pick it up now, as sometimes we need to see the justice in the world. And no matter what, finding representation of comeuppance can do some good. As one reviewer put it, “Despite the breadth of settings and the protagonists’ widely varying circumstances, there are some common themes that permeate the collection: tenacity, resilience, and determination.”
I hope you are inspired to feel all of those things within these shiny new pages.

 

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