There’s a line that goes around in the publishing industry: “You can’t tell a book by its cover, but you can sure sell it.”
In the book world, nobody takes cover art lightly. Publishers pile time, money and talent into cover art. They recruit top artists, run market tests and hold focus groups. And they count on covers to make old books new again, and attract attention in bookstores where half the purchases are made on the whimsy of browsing.
But as the publishing world lurches into the e-book age, covers aren’t coming along for the ride – at least, not as we know them. When books have screens instead of covers, will publishers still be able to lean on them as advertising tools? As more and more books lose the physical form, will cover art follow album art into a land of faded greatness? As cheap Kindles proliferate, the cover seems to be on the verge of obsolescence. But the golden age of graphic design in books might just be beginning.
Cover design is a way of making something fresh, of bringing it back to life.
Where it comes to selling books, packaging matters. Not only does a book’s cover serve as its plumage in the bookstore, it’s especially critical to promoting what publishers call the “backlist,” their ever-growing library of books that are still in print, but no longer a heavily promoted new must-read. (These, in turn, are called “frontlist” books.)
“Cover design is a way of making something fresh, of bringing it back to life,” says Adam Freudenheim, the publisher of Penguin Classics in London. “That’s the challenge with backlists generally: How do you make backlists into frontlists, or make people look at them again with new eyes?”
It’s no small consideration. Backlists can make up a huge proportion of a publishers’ sales – in some cases, more than 80 per cent of them. A bold design can attract attention to an old book, and impress upon purchasers the notion that a book isn’t just old – it has been designated a “classic.”
For instance, on its 75th anniversary, Penguin is reprinting a line of modern classics, from Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, each with new cover art – from a prominent tattoo artist.
The artists (who worked in ink and, to their editor’s faint surprise, watercolours) yielded striking, intricate designs that not only draw attention to themselves, but identify the books as part of a series – one tactic that can help to drive backlist sales.
In the near term, the accelerating pace of change in the book industry is putting pressure on publishers to accentuate the physical design of their books, says Joel Silver, president of Indigo Books & Music.
“The value of putting [a book] on a bookshelf or a coffee table becomes that much more important,” Silver says. “The physical objects will become that much more beautiful.”
The physical sensation of holding and displaying a print book, after all, is one of its competitive advantages.
But these are options that just aren’t there for e-books. Not only do they lack covers in the traditional sense, but some – like Amazon’s Kindle – are grey-scale devices that won’t even display cover images on their screens.
“What we have available to us right now is like 1950s black-and-white television,” says Sarah MacLachlan, president and publisher of House of Anansi Press.
