Subscribe to RSS 2.0Why We Design Covers The Way We Do
Or: These Covers Aren't For You, Oh Reader Of This Blog
You may have noticed that Snowbooks keeps all its design in house. This is for the two very good reasons that it's one of the most fun and most important parts of the publishing process. We design our covers with very clear aims in mind - but interestingly, sometimes people think they're not right for the book. Let's take a look at this, shall we.
(This blog post relates primarily to our fiction.)
Thing The First: our aim in life.
Our primary business goal is to forge excellent relationships with retailers and to use their extensive brand presence, square footage and multiple locations to showcase, and sell, our books. The key part of that sentence is 'to sell our books'. That is what we aim to do. It shouldn't have to be said, really, but in actual fact quite a few smaller publishers don't have sales as one of their primary aims. They are interested in getting a particular sort of book into the public domain, sure, but from their actions it's hard to see how they can be particularly bothered about sales. Instead, they get a bit huffy when the sales team don't seem to be doing a good job. This happens because many publishers focus on the top end of publishing - the editorial end, the creation and signing up and words of a book - as they quite rightly should but not to the exclusion of all else. The subtle difference with our approach is that we start the publishing process with sales very firmly in mind. We'll only take on a book if we think we can sell it. Then, we can immerse ourselves in its creation - but again, with this process strongly informed by the sales plan. When it gets to the end of the creation process, then, it's all ready to be sold. The alternative approach I've seen is to be immersed in the creation of a book entirely, and when it's done to blink a few times and say 'Right. Over to the sales team.' That is not going to result in an easy book to sell.
Thing The Second: How to get a book into a 3for2
And when I say we aim to sell books, I'm not talking about a few sales here and there. With every book I hope for 50,000 copies sold. Now that's hopelessly ambitious and never works (except once), but it's all that aiming for the moon and stars stuff. We hope to appeal to the mass market. There are two reasons for that. One, the mass market has masses of people in it, therefore we don't need much market share before we've got a winner. Two, our retailer partners aim to appeal to the mass market, too. It makes sense to be aiming for the same bunch of people.
As I said above, our strategy is to work with retailers, to use their assets as the primary way to sell our books. We don't see much or any of a sales spike with reviews, or launches, or PR or any of the things that can take up vast amounts of time and money with no guarantee of translating into sales. We do, however, see flipping huge sales when we get a book onto promotion. Ergo, we try to get a lot of our books onto promotion.
Now, what do retailers look for when they're thinking about which books to put onto promotion? They're looking for the sorts of books which sell in quantity. That space at the front of store is precious. It's not fair on them to expect them to take a chance on a book with no indication that it might do well. And most of our authors, we're proud to say, are debut authors. Wonderful though they are, we can rarely point to the success of their previous books to prove to the retailer that they will do well. So we have to rely on something else.
That something else is the sum of the packaging. Endorsements matter: they are a good shorthand to say 'if you value the opinion of the person who's endorsing this book, you might enjoy it.' But it's the cover design itself which is the thing that people see first and foremost.
Thing The Third: Covers are a filter
Bear in mind that of the 100,000-odd books published every year, a tiny fraction are promoted front of store. And then think about what a store looks like, in full promotional swing. There are still far too many books to choose from. Readers, shoppers, need to be given visual clues if they've a hope of navigating their way around that. Imagine if all the front of store books were bound in a plain white cover, with the author and title text in a black plain serif font. It would be a nightmare. You'd never find anything. The cover gives a critical clue about the type of book you're looking for.
Thing The Final: What to do.
But it gets more complicated. What if you have a book like The Letters which, whilst broadly women's lit, is very, very fine - finer, in fact, than its cousins on the shelves? Do you design a cover that reflects its literary ambition, a more sombre, reflective, original cover? Doing that will likely mean it sells 20 copies in total, as it won't be selected for promotion and therefore will die a quiet death. Or do you design a cover that places it slap bang in the women's lit category, knowing that those who select it for its women's lit elements won't be disappointed, but will have also stumbled upon a better-than-average read?
Reader, we did the latter, of course. Whilst some bloggers have disagreed with the rightness of our cover, they are not our target market as there are too few of them. We are trying to catch the eye of, first, the retailer and second, the shopper. Looking at sales so far, I think we've done a good job.
Your thoughts? Here and here and here are some others'.
Comments: 12
Covers are a wonderfully subjective thing but ultimately all that matters is what retailers and readers think of them. Your covers are always high quality and pretty much always hit the right target market. If only the major publishers had such a strike rate!
Posted by: Scott Pack on March 25, 2009 08:39 AM
Oh, you [blushes].
Posted by: Em on March 25, 2009 10:07 AM
I love the cover - the colour and the image work. I would pick it up based on the beauty of the image - then hopefully the blurb would make the sale.
Posted by: liz on March 25, 2009 10:30 AM
What an excellent, informative post. I'll bear your thoughts in mind for the watercolour for the next cover. Thanks.
Posted by: Rachel Green on March 25, 2009 10:35 AM
I understand totally what you are saying about sales. Some publishers behave as though they are a charity for homing books, to the right sort of person, rather than a proper business. You do not, which is to your credit. However comparing like with like, or Snowbook to Snowbook - why such a chic-lit cover for The Letters when you didn't subject, say, The Needle in the Blood (definitely a potential women's interest book) or Mothernight to that treatment?
Posted by: Catherine on March 25, 2009 10:48 AM
My blog post about this book was like all my posts - very honest and (trying to be) straight-talking. Therefore I just said what I thought - that it's a great book but that that rather wimpy cover might put off some potential readers (though I accept that it will entice others). You can't please everyone, I suppose. And it's a talking point which can only be good (can't it?). It reminds me, by the way, of the covers those Jilly Cooper books used to have when I was a teenager (the ones with all different women's names). I read them and loved them back then.
My other problem with this particular cover though is that I can't see what it has to do with the book (except for maybe what looks like the sea in the background). Covers don't have to be related directly to the story of course but there's usually some link somewhere, isn't there? The woman in the frock - she's certainly not even remotely Violet or Elizabeth (not that I can see) so in what sense is she anything to do with anything? It just seems like a 'random women's book' cover or something. Maybe that was the idea...(as I also said in the post).
Whatever - I hope it sells well. I hope it does well all round. All reviews of the actual text/story seem to have been very positive so far!
x
Posted by: Rachel Fox on March 25, 2009 11:43 AM
Although obviously from a business perspective your approach makes complete sense, as a reader of generally literary fiction I inevitably feel saddened at the stranglehold exerted by the promotional methods of bookselling. Although I pick my next reads mainly on recommendations (review sections, trade press, reading friends and online sources), I do sometimes browse in a non-guided way and would probably move right past this based on the cover.
Fantastic that 'chicklit' readers are likely to get an education in better writing, of course. And I'm not kidding myself that they're by far the larger market.
Posted by: FlossieT on March 25, 2009 11:59 AM
Thanks for all the comments.
Catherine: we did! Needle looks just like other historical fiction e.g. CJ Sansom. Mothernight too was modelled on The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud.
The woman in the frock is the author of the letters. I don't want to spoil anything so I shall say no more.
And Flossie - don't feel sad. Them there promotions keep a little press like us in business. And hey - you are the sort who reads reviews, so the novel's excellence has been communicated to you through that route. The browsers who don't read reviews will be captured by the cover. Everyone's a winner - and let me reiterate the fact that if we didn't get this book onto promotion or featured somehow in store NO ONE would read it.
Posted by: Em on March 25, 2009 07:22 PM
It's interesting.
I can understand these points. But would agree with Rachel Fox above. I very often buy books based on the cover and back blurb, and I wouldn't pick up a book like this in a bookshop. It is not the kind of book I would be drawn to, even if it was right at the front of the shop on a special display.
But, I will read it based on reviews
Posted by: annie on March 25, 2009 08:33 PM
"Whilst some bloggers have disagreed with the rightness of our cover, they are not our target market as there are too few of them."
With all due respect Emma, I think this is a pretty contemptuous and contemptible statement. Bloggers are readers, indeed readers who are so passionate about spreading the word on good books that they waste valuable hours - years - of their lives disseminating their views across the web. You may be right from a business point of view that bloggers' views are of no relevance, but it's hard to see that the cover couldn't have been made a little less like an identikit Anita Shreve cover which, according to Rachel above, doesn't actually have any connection to the book. That suggests not just contempt for others' views but contempt for the book itself other than as a piece of merchandise.
However I do applaud your honesty in acknowledging that in order to get books onto promotions, retailers are "looking for the sorts of books which sell in quantity ... It's not fair on them to expect them to take a chance on a book with no indication that it might do well." We are more used to being told that retailers really choose books that they think are worth exposing to a wider audience - based on merit - and that the promotion itself is what creates the 'selling in quantity'.
Sorry to make my debut (I think) comment on your blog sound so grumpy. I do like the covers of your Celestial Omnibus, London Scene and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. I even bought one of them - so you see, good cover design sells as well as bad!
Posted by: John Self on April 12, 2009 10:43 PM
On rereading the above, bizarrely it seems that in my rambling I didn't actually get the point of what I meant to say.
Which was simply this: bloggers are readers, and for every blogger who expresses a view, the likelihood is that there are dozens or more readers who think the same way (at least the comments on my and other blogs tend to suggest this) - so to say that bloggers are not your target market as there are too few of them is, I think, to miss the point that bloggers are just the tip of a much greater body of opinion.
Posted by: John Self on April 12, 2009 11:53 PM
John, sorry I'm only just replying - only just seen your comment.
I have phrased this very badly. I did not mean that bloggers are not important or that even there are too few of them to make a difference. I meant that the few bloggers who find our covers unappealing are outnumbered by other people - both bloggers and otherwise - who find them appealing enough to buy them. My god, I'm horrified that my ham-fisted writing has implied that I do not value bloggers. I am on record in a number of places as saying I value their opinion and writing higher than literary reviewers - indeed I have said that I would happily trade zero broadsheet reviews in the future for blog reviews. So I do apologise for being unclear.
Posted by: Em on May 5, 2009 01:18 PM