book marketing – Page 6 – Patricia J. Parsons

The book cover debate: Here we go again

Posted on 18 Jul 2013 by Patricia J. Parsons

Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote a backstory about my book cover adventures. Then back in May of this, I wrote about the beginning of my newest book cover adventure starting with the news from my editor at that, as he said in an email, “Time and budgetary restraints being what they are, we’re unable to ask our designers to come up with a cover completely from scratch. Rather, it falls to you (and to me)…” And that’s what got me thinking about the differences (or lack thereof) between traditional and independent publishing. At that time I lamented that if I have to design my own cover, what in the world are publishers paying those designers to do exactly?

So, I went on to the web site where this publisher buys stock photos and drawings to search through thousands of images using a variety of relevant search terms. I narrowed it down to a few, modified them in Photoshop, added the appropriate cover text, ran the design by my in-house consultant (my husband) and sent the mock-up along to my editor. A month or so later (he apologized for taking so long to get back to me – evidently during conference season it’s hard to find their marketers. It occurs to me that if you’re at conferences selling books, then you are a sales person. If you are a marketer, I thought that you worked on marketing strategy including cover design – but I digress), he emailed me telling me that my cover mock-up was clever, but they didn’t think it really represented the book very well. Never mind that I don’t think a single member of the ‘marketing team’ has actually read the book.

Then he sent me a stock photo that they thought was appropriate. It. Was. Not. And it wasn’t clever. And it wasn’t interesting. And it wasn’t an image that a single one of my intended readers (this is targeted non-fiction this time) could identify with or would even click on to get further information – and make no mistake, that’s how books are bought these days, particular this kind since they are not designed to go to book stores.

life without end — My first-ever book published by a now-defunct Toronto publisher. Twenty-four years ago, designers actually designed clever covers. It’s time for them to start again.

As any writer of book-length work realizes, the old maxim “You can’t tell a book by its cover” is becoming more and more irrelevant. You might not be able to tell a lot about what’s behind that cover just by seeing the image and text, but in my view (a) you ought to be able to, and (b) that cover really does need to be dynamite these days.

I recently read a marketing study where eBook covers had been changed and sales tracked before and after the change. Just as you might expect, improving the cover increased sales. Although this is not an eBook (but there will be an electronic version naturally), sales will accrue through online channels. This means that the potential buyers will be moved to either explore further or not by what they see on that cover. The truth is, though, that no one has the definitive answer to the question of what makes a truly good book cover design. That’s because each book is unique. So where does that leave us?

Just by coincidence, or perhaps serendipity, The New Yorker online published a piece today titled The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover. The writer Tim Kreider says,”… publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them…” Clearly he doesn’t know about smaller publishers who seem to have less than no money these days for design. He did however describe his own recent experience in which he seemed to have embarked on a similar back and forth between him and his publisher on the design of his book cover. When he suggested that the cover he liked the least was always the one they seem to like the best, I was on his side again. However, he seems to think that well-designed book covers are on their way out, blaming the electronic book trend for this phenomenon. Book covers, he believes, are dull and getting duller. I happen to think that book cover design is going to be even more important as we move ever deeper into electronic purchasing and electronic reading.

I will say that I was completely in agreement with him at the end of the piece when he and his publisher finally agreed on the cover design for the new book. He describes it this way: “…a result nobody would voluntarily have chosen but which everyone could acquiesce to, if only out of exhaustion.”

I am sorely afraid that this is what will eventually become the cover my new book. And it had better happen fast because it’s on the publisher’s fall list.

Again the question: What makes a good cover design? No one really knows these days. While I await my editor’s next move (back to the drawing board he said yesterday after he finally, a month later, responded to my email detailing why I thought his suggestion was lame) I’d be interested to know what draws you into a book that no one has actually recommended to you. Is it that cover?

Backstory, Book publishers, Self-Publishing, Uncategorized

The trouble with publishers (Part 1: Let’s talk vanity publishing)

Posted on 24 Jan 201224 Jan 2012 by Patricia J. Parsons

confessions — My "first" novel published by the now defunct Carlton Press, New York

It’s time for me to begin to come clean about a part of my publishing backstory that I have yet to explore. That is the story about my relationship with editors and publishers. Apart from my periodic arguments with editors about comma placement or the use of the singular verb after “one of” (I lost that argument – seems that there are several different rules none of which I was privy to prior to meeting this particularly particular editor), my relationships have been based on a serious skepticism (on my part) about their ability to recognize a quality book or predict whether or not a book will sell. If an editor loves a submitted manuscript, he or she might go ahead and publish. That doesn’t mean anyone else will like it! I am also skeptical about their ability to actually sell a book. I’ll start at the beginning.

If you visit my web site that gives you chapter and verse on my books and other assorted writing through the years, you’ll see that my work has been published by a variety of publishers – different countries, different sizes, different missions – and even different publishing models.

Two of my co-authored books were actually published by the same publisher – and it’s that publisher that has me thinking about my journey through the publishing business over the past twenty-plus years. I’m thinking about it now because I have a book at this publisher again – a book that is half way through the review process, with positive signs all around, when the editor who is enthusiastically responsible for the project resigns to take up a new (and presumably more lucrative) position with another publisher. I can’t blame him, but I was informed about his imminent departure only two weeks in advance, and that was weeks before Christmas. I’ve heard nothing from the publisher since. Hello! Author out here! Anybody listening? If the percentage that an author receives from book sales is any indicator, I’d have to say that authors who are not famous (i.e. do not have name beginning with, let’s say for example “O”) are the lowest on the totem pole. Apart from how hard this is on one’s (my) ego, it just seems wrong to me.

So…back to the backstory. My first book was published by a small non-fiction, trade-book publisher in Toronto – that has since gone bankrupt. This isn’t surprising – happens to publishing houses all the time. Let that be a cautionary note to authors. But I’ve told that story before.

Since then, I’ve offered my books to a variety of publishers, many of which have actually offered contracts and eventually published them. But I’ve also ventured into self-publishing. Oh, yes. Self-publishing.

Before self-publishing had any kind of credibility (one of my assumptions here is that it has risen a notch or two on the cred barometer in recent years,) it was referred to strictly as ‘vanity publishing.’ Presumably it was vain for an author to pay to have his or her book published. I’ve never been sure why it isn’t ‘vanity recording’ when a musician pays to have a CD recorded and subsequently distributed, but I digress.

According to him, a man by the name of Jonathan Clifford coined the phrase vanity publishing around 1960.[1] Clifford’s lifetime crusade was for honesty in the vanity publishing world. It is true that over the years, authors who could not get – or did not try to get – mainstream publishers (more about that breed later) would pay to have their work produced, and those vanity publishers would suggest to the authors that they could, perhaps, just maybe, probably get rich. That was the problem. As Clifford says:

If you cannot find a mainstream publisher to publish your work at their expense, you must look on the whole process of publishing not as money invested to make you a return, but as money spent on a pleasurable hobby which you have enjoyed and which has provided you with well-manufactured copies of your book. If you do also manage to make a small profit, then that should be looked upon as an unforeseen and unexpected bonus![2]

Today, the notion of the vanity press (versus other self-publishing options) seems to be tied into the issue of promises made by these entities – promises that they cannot possibly keep – and into their lack of editing. So, the term self-publishing has arisen and seems to have taken on a less pejorative connotation.

Self-publishing, from the author’s point of view though, is exactly the same as vanity publishing. The author pays. And any author who thinks a publisher, regardless of whether they make you pay or they pay you, can predict much less guarantee sales success of your book, is naïve in the extreme. Unless you have a name that is widely recognized, there is no way to predict sales. This is where my personal skepticism begins to creep into the relationship between author and publisher. But, what seems like a hundred years ago now, I did take up with one of those vanity publishers two years after my first non-fiction book was published by a ‘real’ publisher.

The book was called Confessions of Failed Yuppie. Yup. And it was funny. Without benefit of even a modicum of editing (not one syllable was altered nor one typo corrected), this vanity press took my substantial fee and provided me with two cartons of the 130-page, hard-covered books. I was thrilled. But something kept me from mentioning its provenance to anyone– although I’m not sure anyone would have cared. Many of my friends read the book and told me that they were amused. I even still get a small check every year from the Public Lending Right Commission because there are copies of it in libraries across the country. Anyone want to read it? [Side note: literary blogger Donigan Merrit tells the story in his blog entry dated September 8, 2011 that his first job out of undergrad was as a copy-editor for Carlton Press. It never occurred to me that they employed any!]

So, what’s wrong with this kind of model? What makes a vanity-published book, or a self-published book less worthy than a book published via the more traditional publishers? In a word, quality – but not necessarily quality of the content, story, theme or writing. Quality of the editing. Vanity publishers never offered editors. That’s where today’s self-publishing models differ from their predecessors. Today’s self-publishers often offer editing services – but you’ll have to pay for them.

Next week…Adventures in self-publishing.

Want a laugh? Here’s the back cover of Confessions of a Failed Yuppie. Remember that it was 1991…

[1] Vanity Publishing: Advice & Warning. http://www.vanitypublishing.info/

[2] http://www.vanitypublishing.info/ [accessed January 24, 2012]

Book covers, Book promotion

Author photos & bios: Reasons to care

Posted on 11 Jan 201211 Jan 2012 by Patricia J. Parsons

cannes 09 — Would this make a good book-jacket photo?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I’m wondering what those thousand words could possibly be as I contemplate the photos on some of my book covers. And then when I read the bios, it occurs to me that the author bio issue is even more fraught with considerations.

Generally, from my point of view, the author photo on the book cover has two distinct objectives:

* To assist in the marketing of the book.

* To massage the author’s ego.

Achievement of the first objective is very difficult to figure out. Achievement of the second – a lot easier.

Book marketers see the visual needs of the potential book buyer as very important important (that’s why covers are very important); thus the author photo is a key part of the book jacket’s appeal or lack thereof as far as they’re concerned. One web commentator suggests that there are three reasons to put author photos on book covers…

Author photos help to sell books.
Author photos help to build name recognition.
Author photos help TV bookers decide whether the author would be “good television” material[1].

Valid points, all; however, no one really knows the extent to which an author’s image assists in the selling of the book. No one seems to have done any solid research.

Patient Power — We convinced them to put us on the front cover. Quite a coup!

Some years ago when my co-author (husband) and I were negotiating the cover for a health-related book targeted at the general public, we insisted that to personalize it, our photo had to be on the cover. We had previous experience of this publisher; they had not wanted any photo on the earlier one, front or back. In fact the cover issue was a contentious one with this publisher. This time around, we wanted our photo there – and not on the back cover – we wanted it to be the front cover. When a doctor and a health educator are writing a book that they hope will benefit the readers, it seemed important to us that when potential readers slid it off a shelf in a book store (it was the dark ages, after all), they might be interested in who was speaking to them. It seems that most book marketers agree, but there are pitfalls here. The selection of the photo can be hazardous.

Paul Hiebert, writing online in Flavorwire makes a very good point: “Excellent authors avoid writing clichés. The problem is that some of these very authors do not apply the same level of vigilance when it comes to taking promotional photographs, whether they’re for magazine profiles or back-of-the-book biographies…”[2] He describes the kinds of staged photos that really do give little information to the potential reader and often make the author look, well, clichéd. His piece is worth a click.

If you think that no one actually looks at author photos, you might want to surf by David Wills’ piece The Curse of the Douchey Author Photo, wherein he writes an email to a reader who actually had the temerity to write a nasty note about the photo on his book. It makes an author think carefully about image, an image and personal brand that are influenced by both the photo and the bio.

Over the years, I’ve had publishers who insisted that there be no author photo (very hard on the author ego) as well as others who insist on one (easy on the ego if I get to select the photo – which I do). Their focus was on the author bio. A succinct statement of author credentials is very important to readers who are looking for information in addition to entertainment. I take great pains over the construction of that very brief bio, taking into consideration the needs and wants of the actual target market. What do they want to know about me? What do they need to know about me? What do they not care about? Then I avoid over-sharing – the plague of the modern technological society.

When it comes to fiction, the author’s bio might not be all that important. Do you really care what kinds of previous books the author wrote? Do you care where the author lives? Probably not. You are probably going to be more concerned about the book summary on the cover and whether or not it is compelling to you as an individual reader. Do you care what the author looks like? Probably not. But you might be curious. The real down side to this is that an author photo might actually put off the bigots of the world who might be the very people who need to open their minds.

Two different kinds of books (first, historical fiction; second, business), two different photos & bios — same author.

[1] http://www.writersblock.ca/summer2002/feature.htm

[2] http://flavorwire.com/117566/against-promotional-author-photographs