Thanks for all the great feedback on the first round of cover designs, it’s so good to know that we have readers and authors who care so much. I started this post with the cover images above instead of me talking so the covers could speak for themselves.
Most of the feedback we got on the first set of designs revolved around 2 things:
- Our brand is really tied to the author images and wanting to bring those back
- Questions about what the images would look like
As far as the author images go, we think the more important issue is author name recognition. The new covers more prominently display author names. The font for author names on front is much larger than the old design and we think better draws attention to the authors. For books with 1 author, or even 2-3 authors, those large names will really pop. The back cover (example below) now features brief bios, also better highlighting author names and expertise. We think that in terms of selling author expertise and in turn selling books, names and bios are more important selling features to most customers. In fact, we hired an outside firm to research the Wrox product, and the research showed that a majority of customers did not know who the people are on the cover or why they were on there. It’s only a small part of the audience who knows authors by how they look. For everyone else, the photos did not help sell books. Yes, we do know there’s a very small number of authors for whom their photo and face are an important part of their personal branding and who are recognized by a decent fraction of their audiences. We hope that by continuing to use their photos with the bios within the book, on wrox.com, and in other promotional material we have a good solution that serves the authors and the audience whether or not they know the author’s face.
Second, yes, there is a theme and it will become more apparent as you see more finished covers. And the theme ties to the user level or type of book. The covers themselves come in 3 primary patterns. The Professional covers as shown above remain mostly red with black and yellow highlights, a very similar color mix to the current covers. Most of the Professional images will relate in some way to speed, faster, efficient, with as one commenter noted, a highlight on the red object with everything else fading to black and white. The Beginning series covers have a mostly white background, a simpler and cleaner look for the Beginning audience with red highlights. Going forward, those images will focus on control, in black and white with red highlights. And Problem Design Solution as well as other books outside Professional and Beginning are more black and yellow with red highlights. And the images for those will feature architecture, again in black and white with red highlights. No, we’re not attempting to tie the contents of the photo to the book topic, not any more than say a series of fish, ladders, or a multitool have to do with ASP.NET. Sometimes a picture is just a picture.
As mentioned in the first post, in addition to the cover look the new covers will be printed on sturdier paper than won’t curl so much. The books themselves are now being printed on a much nicer, whiter paper – something our customers have really been asking for and that’s getting great initial reaction. I’m glad about the reaction to the white paper, which commenters and twitter responses noted as being more important than cover design.
The change from an established brand look is always a difficult step to take. We know we are sacrificing some brand recognition in order to start building something new that we think is better.
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