I’ve read no shortage of spectacular books over the years, more than a few of which came wrapped in some pretty unspectacular covers.
Conversely, I’ve read—or tried to read–some truly awful books that came camouflaged behind the most fantastic and ultimately misleading covers imaginable. Books are a lot like people. As the old adage goes, looks can be deceiving. Never judge what’s inside either based on outward appearances. And yet I am ever surprised by the number of readers who admit that the cover of a book influences whether they’ll buy it or not. Indeed, recent studies show that upwards of six in 10 Americans will choose a book based solely on the visual design of the cover.
Which brings me to fishing lures.
During the summer break between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I landed a minimum-wage clerk’s job selling sporting goods at a store in downtown Denver. One early morning each week before the store opened, I was required to attend (unpaid, of course) presentations put on by sales reps from various sporting goods companies. The ostensible purpose of these presentations was to educate my fellow clerks and me about each rep’s product line. Their real purpose, of course, was to get us to push their stuff on our customers and not the other guy’s, much the way pharmaceutical sales reps lobby physicians to prescribe their company’s drugs. I sat through hours of those presentations. Camping gear. Tennis rackets. Golf clubs. Baseball mitts. You name it. More than 40 years later, I recall with clarity virtually nothing of what was pitched, with one exception: the sales rep who showed up one morning to gush about the sure-fire fishing lures his company manufactured. I knew them to be good lures before he’d even opened his mouth. I’d caught plenty of perch and bluegill and small-mouth bass using them. Then the sales rep revealed something I’ve never forgotten:
“We don’t design our lures to attract the fish,” he said. “We design them to attract the fisherman.”
I was stunned. Here I had always assumed that some elite corp of master anglers wearing starched white lab coats, who understood by their vast experience how fish think, let alone what fish prefer to eat, imbued their genius in the construction of those little bits of metal and wood and sometimes feathers that I bought and cast out at the end of my monofilament line. Clearly, though, I was wrong.
You may be asking, Dave, what do fishing lures have to do with buying books? Well, if the number of people who buy a book strictly on the basis of its cover and my fishing analogy hold water, the correlation is unarguable.
The reader who judges and buys a book based on its cover is not much different, in my opinion, than the angler who buys a lure based on nothing more than that particular lure’s appearance. Both consumers have been seduced into their respective purchases by the look of the product, not whether the product actually works which, in the case of any work of fiction, is the story itself—those 300 pages or so between the front and back covers.
To be fair, assuming the cover passes muster, the typical reader will first “test drive” a book before deciding whether it’s worth plunking down their hard-earned money. They’ll peruse the summary on the dust jacket or back cover, then likely skim or listen to the sample pages of the first chapter. Maybe they’ll read the blurbs from other authors and take a look at how many stars the book gets on goodreads.com. To this I say, awesome! Sink or swim, pass or fail, all writers aspire to be judged on the quality of their work product, which is that story they have labored over for months and sometimes years. They don’t want to be judged on the quality of the wrapper the story comes in.
Traditionally published authors like me generally have final say over the cover of our books, but the reality is, few of us have the artistic vision to conceive a great cover on our own. Fortunately in my case that responsibility falls on talented art production manager Candace Edwards and her equally talented team at Blackstone Publishing. I couldn’t be happier with their cover design of my newest Cordell Logan mystery, DEEP FURY, which debuts in December.
I hope both the book and the cover meet your favor.