Tag: book cover

The After-After-Thought: The Spine

If a book’s back cover is often an after-thought, the spine is an after-after-thought.

Yet, as I wrote in my last post, the spine is the backbone of the whole operation. The thing holding the front and back cover together.

Typically (unless you or your readers upload photos or videos to Amazon or other retailers) your book’s spine won’t be visible to browsing customers online.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in an effort.

In fact, there are two reasons spine design deserves your special attention:

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The Forgotten Back Cover

Back in the days when brick-and-mortar book stores and libraries dominated, the back of a book was perhaps the next thing most readers would turn to after glancing at the cover, and before making the decision to purchase or borrow. The back cover was where you’d find not only the book’s blurb, but a tagline, endorsements from reviewers (also known as ‘blurbs’), any awards the book had been nominated for or won, and a short bio about the author.

In our current era of online bookstores, ereaders, and indie publishing, the back cover has been largely replaced by the description field on retail sites. In many cases, the front cover has taken on of the burdens of the back cover, with taglines, quotes, awards, and even biographical details jammed onto a book’s front.

So it should come as no surprise then, that self-publishing guides pay scant attention to back covers. E-books don’t require (or really have the facilities for) back covers at all (much to my disappointment!).

Even when ordering a paperback online, back covers don’t seem to play a significant role in readers’ decision-making. They’re much harder to see than front covers, requiring the reader to use the ‘look inside’ preview on Amazon, and then click ‘Back Cover’ to see a preview. It’s much easier to simply read the description, which also has the advantage of being searchable, and easily legible.

Why should indie authors bother with a back cover, then? And why bother to write a whole blog post about them?

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In Defence of [Some] Bad Book Covers

Over the past year, I’ve read or referred to over eighty books about books and publishing. The vast majority single out a book’s cover as one of – if not its most – important features. In fact, some even go so far as to say that a bad cover will almost doom a book to failure. Others even suggest that if you have to choose between paying for editing or cover design, you should choose cover design. But why is this? And might there be some instances in which bad book covers are actually… good?

In How to Be a Writer, John Birmingham points to kindlecoverdisasters.tumblr.com as an example of some of the ‘bad’ covers that exist. And I can’t say after scrolling through several pages that I found any books I was tempted to find out more about, let alone pay money for and read.

But is that necessarily a bad thing?

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How to Read: A beginner’s guide

A few years back, I purchased a book called “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It was originally published in 1940, and is described as a “living classic” on the blurb. Yet it fails in one key aspect – How does one learn how to read THIS book? Or, indeed, to select a book like “How to Read a Book” in the first place?

Clearly, this “classic guide to intelligent reading” is, just like the cookbook “How to Boil Water” I reviewed here some time ago, more advanced than it lets on.

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