How to judge a book by its cover

Of course you can judge a book by its cover. In fact, that’s precisely the point of it. Now, a HarperCollins Australia expert explains why.

Catherine Milne - HarperCollins Australia’s head of fiction.

I think we all know the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. It’s an old saying, trotted out to remind us that we shouldn’t prejudge the worth or value of something by its outward appearance alone.

But when it comes to books, you can just toss that old adage out the window because it’s useless — and plain wrong. Of course you can judge a book by its cover. In fact, that’s precisely the point of a book cover.

As a booklover, it all feels very easy. I’m sure you’ve often been in the situation where you’ve browsing in a bookshop, and aren’t there so many pretty, beautiful, intriguing covers to look at?

A cover catches your eye, you reach out, pick it out of the many others crowded onto the shelves. You turn it over and read the blurb, then the endorsements, and – if you’re anything like me, you flick to the first pages, read them, and then you think “Yes, this is my kind of book…” The process feels so natural and organic, right? It’s kismet! A case of love at first sight.

But what you probably don’t know is that hours and hours of thought, design and hard work has gone into making that process seem easy and effortless.

In fact, the cover is an increasingly sophisticated marketing tool that has to do a lot of work and communicate a lot of information in a very short space of time.

A book cover has to: a) grab your attention, b) tell you enough about the book to understand what genre it is – that is, what kind of book it is and if you’re likely to read that kind of book – and then c) make itself compelling enough that you pick it off the shelf and – hopefully – decide you might like it and take it to the counter to buy it.

The cover sends out all kinds of signals to you – both subtle and obvious – to help you work out what kind of book it is and what genre it fits into.

Our book of the month, Devil's Lair by Sarah Barrie.

I’m sure you’d recognise immediately many of the main features of the various genres.

There are the bright pastel colours and illustrative covers of chicklit; the dark, moody, often rainswept covers of crime novels (although with the recent resurgence in Australian crime, there’s a spate of local crime novels featuring the dry, dusty colours of the outback); the crowns, dragons, swords, snakes, swirling robes and sinister landscapes of fantasy; the arty angles, striking images and interesting fonts of literary fiction; the arresting single image often used by psychological thrillers (a lit window in a dark house, the half open door, the dark passage…); and of course the traditional ‘woman in landscape’ (with the woman often seen from behind or glancing over their shoulder) for historical commercial women’s fiction.

The challenge for every designer is to ensure that a book fits within its genre, and yet also stands out – who wants a book that looks exactly like the last one we just read?

Every publishing house knows just how important a book cover is – and how important it is that we get it right.

That’s why we spend hours and hours in-house on book cover design, which includes thinking about who is the target audience for that book, what similar books look like, briefing a designer, looking at draft designs, asking for changes to be made, testing the cover with audiences, writing shoutlines, getting endorsements and so on.

Everything needs to be carefully considered. The font of the title, the size of the print, the image and colours on the cover – all of these things are deliberately chosen to tell you something about the book, and make it intriguing or attractive enough that you want to buy it.

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton

But what I love and am particularly fascinated by, is the way a book can look so different when it is published around the world, when different countries choose their own cover, overlaying their own particular national fashion, style and cultural tastes on the book. Sometimes a cover travels internationally – the phenomenal bestseller Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton is being published across 34 territories, with almost all choosing to use the distinctive bright pink and orange Australian cover.

But mostly, different countries have very different tastes in book covers.

In the case of debut Australian novelist Felicity McLean and her darkly comic mystery The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, which has now been published in Australia, the UK and the US, the Australian designer produced three quite similar versions of the cover – and remarkably, each version was chosen by a different country as their preferred cover.

Very happily – and unusually – this meant that the novel looked remarkably similar across all three territories:

But mostly, covers for books can vary quite radically from country to country.

The international bestseller The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland, sold in 28 countries around the world, has very different covers from country to country – but all have a distinct prettiness, inspired by the floral themes within the novel.

Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland

Catherine Milne is the head of fiction at HarperCollins Publishers Australia

BOOK OF THE MONTH

With its cover of impenetrable bushland, it is is no surprise to find July’s Sunday Book Club book of the month is a psychological thriller set in the Tasmanian wilderness. Devil’s Lair by Sarah Barrie is an entralling story of a mansion with a sinister past and the woman who must unlock its secrets to save her sanity. Sunday Book Club readers can get a 30 per cent discount at Utopia by using the code NCBT19. And don’t forget to talk covers, mystery and all your favourite books at The Sunday Book Club on Facebook.