Do Publishers Judge a Book by its cover?
It’s common knowledge that even though we are not supposed to, the average person judges a book by its cover. But what about book-savvy pros like agents at publishing companies? People ask all the time whether a professional cover will get a publisher to notice their book. There are many things that a publisher considers when determining if a book should be represented by their company:
- Summary of the book
- Relevance of the book to mass markets
- The reputation of the author
- What similar books are already out
A good book cover can be a key to distinguishing yourself from your competitors. For example, many times manuscripts land on publishers’ desks without covers, or if they do have covers, it’s an author’s attempt at doing the artwork themselves. Imagine your book, pristinely printed through a high-quality print-on-demand process, with a beautiful professional cover, sitting on top of a bunch of other plain manuscripts. It does not take a veteran publisher to tell you that the professional book with the pretty cover is going to get the most attention! And in that moment, your book is judged by its cover.
One of our authors had this exact experience. After seeing his cover, the president of a publishing company advised his review staff to read that author’s book before all the other manuscripts. Now this didn’t guarantee him a contract, but it did isolate him from the rest of his competition and kept him from being the next stack of words thrown into the waste bin.
The moral of this story is to get yourself a great book cover! If a picture is worth a thousand words, then your book cover is worth the sum of all the words it contains. If you have done your research and have a good product, then your book cover might actually be the deciding factor of whether a publisher wants to represent you or not.
Adazing has created professional covers for first-time authors, #1 New York Times best selling authors and everything in between. We would love to help your book shine! Our Book Cover Design page has everything you need to know about commissioning us to work on your book. Help your book get a positive verdict when it is inevitably judged by its cover.
