FRIDAY JUNE 26, 2009

Judging Books by Their Covers

Ready for a quick design lesson?

Click on the picture to go to Joseph Sullivan’s list of Favorite Book Covers for 2008. (That one’s my favorite, by the way.)

Now, imagine you wrote a book this year. And your book just entered the market, along with the 172,000 other books published in the U.S. that year.¹

And it’s a FANTASTIC book: engaging characters, compelling story, a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter.

And all you have to do is get people to choose your book out of the veritable ocean of other books in the world. (Yeah, welcome to the long tail.)

When Mrs. Foster told you, way back in the First Grade, that you “shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, she wasn’t really talking about books. She was talking about people. Or vegetables. Or whatever. But definitely not about books.

Because everybody judges books by their covers. That’s how it works! How else would you sort through Amazon.com or the world’s endless bookshelves trying to find something to keep you occupied during the four hours between San Francisco and Cleveland? (Hi, Mom.)

Here’s the lesson: People see far too many presentations every year to judge them based on content alone. And this becomes more true the higher up the ladder you climb. So, like it or not, people are going to judge you by your cover. And that means everything visual about your presentation, from your slides themselves all the way down to your shoes. (Yes, they check out your shoes.)

It’s still not nice to judge people by their covers, and all vegetables deserve the benefit of the doubt, but if you imagine your audience judging you by your visuals, it might give you the motivation you need to make them worthy of the attention.

Good luck!

¹ 2006 numbers

Topic: Design
Tags: communication, Design, messaging, Visuals

COMMENTS (3)

Rowan Manahan

^{June 26th, 2009

2:44 pm}

And this is never more true than in the publishing and bookselling sectors. I had a book published by Random House a few years back and got an urgent call from my editor to check my email and approve cover copy and layout – about 9 months before the book was going to be published! I was still about 8 weeks from submitting the final manuscript, but apparently I had to sign off on the cover THAT DAY.

Why? Because the Frankfurt book fair was coming up and they needed cover mockups to show to the distributors and buyers. And on that basis, these fine folk submitted their advance orders …

Sheesh!

Jan Schultink

^{June 27th, 2009

12:06 pm}

If you want to get views for your presentation on platforms like Slideshare, the first page of your presentation is incredibly important.

ade

^{June 29th, 2009

12:45 pm}

I’m guilty of judging presenters by their ‘covers’. When I see someone whose appearance is very appealing and who has a great presentation to go, I’m all ears. Thanks for the post.

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