No matter how brilliant a piece of writing is, if it doesn’t know who the audience should be or doesn’t give enough context about its subject, the writing fails to be read, understood, and shared. It fails to communicate. The same holds true for book design.
book covers
Gendered Book Covers and Why Boys Read Less than Girls
By Sydnee Chesley
In 2016, Scholastic conducted a survey on over two thousand US children ages six to seventeen and found that when it came to reading, boys generally do not like it as much as girls do.
Judging a Book by Its Gender
By Des Hewson
Women make up the bulk of sci-fi readership in addition to romance readership. They aren’t put off by “masculine” covers. Yet women writers still find themselves marginalized on the shelf by curly script and a florid indulgence of pink. Which begs the question: to what purpose?
Publisher Aesthetic as Visual Brand
By Jasmine Gower
Even before readers notice the Ooligan hook on the spine, they can often recognize the arts and crafts style and blue and green color palettes for which Ooligan book covers have recently become known.
Musical Book Covers
By Marina Garcia
I can’t be the only one attached to my favorite book’s original cover—so why does it seem to change so often?
Why You Should Absolutely Judge a Book by Its Cover
By Hanna Ziegler
The saying is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but the truth is, we all do—and we’re actually supposed to. Someone designed that cover with specific intentions for you, the reader, to pull the book off the shelf and take a closer look. If I think about it too hard, I realize how shallow and materialistic I am as a reader and how hard a cover has to work just to get me to pick it up. My recent interest in cover design has to do with a challenge I’m undertaking this year to read at least thirty books with a main character who would be classified as a minority in America. Finding books that show this diversity on the cover is actually a lot more difficult than I expected.