Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

UP UNTIL A few years ago, most books in the public domain were lacking. Not lacking in words, which hadn’t changed, but lacking in style, lacking in design, lacking, mostly, in the emotional bond many readers forge when (sorry!) they judge a book by its cover. Most of the classics found on Project Gutenberg didn’t have a cover, and those that did tended to have a scanned, grainy image from a long time ago. “It might technically be available, but if it is, it’s ugly and poor quality,” Jennifer 8. Lee, a co-founder of digital literary studio Plympton, says of the covers on many public domain texts.

It feels wrong to complain about something that’s free, but without a cover, a book, though certainly still a book, is just a bit less gripping. Two years ago, Lee and her collaborators at Plympton were redesigning the website for DailyLit, which aims to get people to read small chunks of fiction daily. They figured they’d use books from Project Gutenberg, the volunteer effort to digitize and archive classic works in the public domain. Then they saw what they were working with. Lee considered commissioning new covers. “It was prohibitively expensive,” she says. Then she recalled a conversation she had with Creative Action Network, a startup aimed at crowdsourcing artwork to support artists and social causes. (Remember Design for Obama? That was them.)...

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but how do you take the 100,000 or so of them in a book and consolidate them into a single image? Book covers help readers instantly decide if a a book is meant for them. After all, a single image is a lot quicker to digest than 150+ pages of text.

So how do you make sure that a cover captures the soul of a book and intrigues the right reader to pick it off the shelf (whether physical or digital)? Start with genre. This article explores how to design book covers for different genres of literature, so when your book is judged by its cover, it’ll come up a winner....