It’s All About the Book Jacket, Stupido! From No-Seller to Best-Seller
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008How important is the book jacket for your book? Critical, I’d say. If you are an unknown writer, your book must practically leap off the page and jump into the Amazon shopping cart all on its own. Of course, if you are a writer with a following and have cajoled all your colleagues into writing glowing testimonials about your book for the cost of a glass of Chardonnay, the jacket-as-sales-tool isn’t quite so critical since readers take endorsements seriously — at least until they’ve read the book.
Book Jackets That Look Pretty and Do Nothing.
I particularly enjoy clicking over to lulu.com, one of the printers for self-publishers and independent publishers, to check out the top 100 books listed (most of which are nonfiction, by the way). Here is an example of a perfectly beautiful book jacket for Understanding Business Statistics by Ned Freed that is lovely to look at, but next to worthless as a sales tool. The Wicked Witch of Publishing has suffered mightily through advanced probability and statistics (and received an A, thank you) and for all the world cannot detect any correlation between this beautiful cover and the book’s 604 pages of content.
Book Jackets that Demand — at the Very Least — a Peek or Sneak Peek!
