Interesting Observation about Cover Design
While talking about books and authors with my mother-in-law a couple of weeks ago, she realized she had read two of the books by a best-selling author we know, but she’d missed that there was a third book. I showed her the cover for the third book, to see if she recognized it (since she’d recognized the other two more by the cover than the title or author name), and realized that while the first two covers share some similar elements, the third cover was a radically different style. These aren’t books in a series–each one is a stand-alone–but with the clear connection between the first two book covers, it’s easy to see why my MIL missed the third book: it didn’t look like a book by this author to her.
Getting this perspective from someone outside of the book world was super interesting to me. As many jokes as there are about people going into bookstores and asking for a book by saying “it has a blue cover?”, there’s a level of reality to that joke. People really DO remember books by cover art. And if you’ve got it in your mind that a specific style is a book by a certain author, having a different style of cover on one of their books can really throw you off. It’s extremely important for a series to look like a series, but if you write a lot of stand-alone books and want people to find them easily, you should consider picking some sort of thematic element to tie them together.
If you look at my book covers, you can easily see that I’ve only followed this advice for series. My Brass and Glass book covers, all by the talented J. Kathleen Cheney, are clearly connected to each other. My Unfixed Timelines covers, which I create myself from historical photographs, also share similar elements. (And I do have several loosely connected superhero books illustrated by the incomparable Luke Spooner, so they are at least similar in style.) But understanding how my MIL missed a book by an author she enjoys reading now has me thinking about finding a way to connect my future book covers to each other!
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