We arrive. It’s a square building, nondescript, concrete with a pair of smoky glass rectangles allowing entrance and exit. It screams lack of imagination. Utilitarianism.
Me: “Do we have to come here? This is gonna be boring!
Mom: “Don’t judge a book by its cover, honey.”
This is ubiquitous parenting advice. I wouldn’t be surprised if half to three-quarters of kids born and raised in the United States hadn’t been told exactly this by a parent, teacher, babysitter, or obnoxious friend. The advice is easy to remember and can be extracted in full from the memory banks of automaton adults simply by saying the first 4 words.
But there’s a problem. All that diligent advice-giving to mold us into mature adults who think before they speak or act DID NOT WORK. It failed, utterly. For the truth is that everyone judges a book by its cover. Literally. When you are browsing for books to read, your first assessment will be (stated with 95%+ confidence) the cover of the book. If the cover doesn’t look like what you want it to look like, or what you think the cover should look like based on other covers you like, you pass by the book.
What’s particularly strange about this piece of advice we all ignore is that it makes total sense that we ignore it. The intention is pure, of course. The goal is to avoid making snap judgments when such judgments can be harmful or lead one astray. But snap judgments are a heuristic that makes modern life possible. If we lived this advice as it was intended, we’d do nothing but sit in our homes, quivering like jello, alternating between second-guesses and following rabbits down unproductive holes. Examine nearly any element of your life and you’ll discover mental short-cuts based on conscious or unconscious patterns, effectively odds calculations that say: if this cover does not look like a cover I’d like, the odds are that the book won’t be what I like, either. Frankly, it’s entirely reasonable to think this way.
All this to say that my covers for Synchronicity and Demergence weren’t making it through that perception filter. So they had to change.
I don’t blame my original cover designer. His history of work is pretty top-notch. However, I got very involved in the design process. There was symbolism that needed to be incorporated. I shied away from the obvious image. My ideas were good ones, of course (except they weren’t) and my input was essential to the process (except it wasn’t) and so I ended up with covers that I really loved but which utterly failed to capture the attention of browsing readers. My ad spend has been a waste. I’ve even had reviewers pick up and subsequently reject the book because my cover does not communicate the genre effectively.
All of that is changing in the coming days. Both covers are being replaced with much more eye-catching examples. The cover for Synchronicity, for example, had effectively 0% creative input from me. The designer took my book synopsis, my examples of covers I liked, and my explanation of the key elements of the book and provided me with two attractive designs, one of which I hated. The only input I had was to ask for one tiny thing on the cover to be removed (didn’t fit the genre) and one of their design ideas from the rejected cover option to be incorporated. The designer liked that, thought it added depth and intrigue and thus the cover was done. The best part: it is definitely eye-catching. Whether you like it or not, you won’t miss it. And, as Las Vegas proved for the better part of the latter-20th century until now, eye-catching works.