Book cover color?

[telophase]

Because it seems that all knowledge is contained in fandom my friendslist: I remember from some time ago that David Cherry once had to repaint a book cover from green to blue because he was told that green covers didn't sell as well. So I've always had it in my head that this is the case - is this true, if it was true then, is it still true now? Does anyone out there know? Bueller? Bueller?

I've poked around Google a bit but can't come up with any keywords that get me results that give info on what elements of a book cover design make a book sell and what don't - I just end up with a bunch of self-publishing sites and graphic art studios that want me to pay them a bunch of money to design a book cover.

Chalk this up to one of those things that occur to me at random and then I start obsessing over for no reason.

Comments

[cawingcrow.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I wonder if that is covered in this survey:

http://www.bisg.org/publications/consumer2002.html

Of course, our library doesn't have it, but someone must somewhere.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hrm. It might, but I haven't been able to find it in any library in town and none of the business databases we subscribe to seem to have anything on it. Ah well.

[cawingcrow.livejournal.com]

Track a library down in Worldcat and see if they have a virtual reference chat or an e-mail address so you can convince a nice librarian to go check and maybe even scan the pages for you? I'm pretty sure you have better databases than we do.

[cawingcrow.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, the study that another writer cited that pointed me to the BISG was done in 1999, she seemed to have the same "green is bad" info as you and no more information other than that there was a study in 1999.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ah, that would be a useful idea. Thanks! XD

[solarbird]

I don't know whether it's true, but I have heard this story independently of you. So at very least, we know it's one of those stories going around art circles.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm not in a bookstore or at home where tehre's far more books, but I've got a wad o'books on web coding sitting on my desk, and the only one that's anywhere near green is closer to aqua than pure green. (O'Reilly's Informaiton Architecture for the World Wide Web, if anyone cares.)

I have a feeling that there's not much green on the books on my shelves at home, but I can't quite remember.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Googling for [david-cherry repaint green blue] accidentally got me: http://64.33.77.146/discus/messages/4220/7298.html?1068831297

[cawingcrow.livejournal.com]

This isn't what you are looking for, but it is a rather interesting article on the topic of book covers and sales in general:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1933625,00.html

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting. And we had Front Cover, mentioned in the article, which didn't say anything about the color but when I looked trhugh the covers it listed, pure green tended not to be used - it tended to be an off green, if it was present at all, and the three covers that had big, bright, green elements were Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero, a title I've forgotten by Douglas Coupland*, and Nabokov's Lolita. All of which are intended to be edgy and in-your-face.


* Looking him up on Amazon.com doesn't produce that particular cover, but his All Families are Psychotic is GREEN. Now I want to know how the sales of that book rack up against his others...

[oneiroelpida.livejournal.com]

Did someone tell the cover artist of the Half Blood Prince that? Because somehow, I don't think it actually hurt sales.

Looking over my shelf, the only green book I have is a Sherlock and Holmes book from the 1940s, and I don't think they cared as much then about consumer fickleness. As far as the actual question, no clue.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Half-Blood Prince would have sold if they'd wrapped the cover in bacon and Astroturf. :D I don't think cover color would affect the sales significantly on that one. XD

[oneiroelpida.livejournal.com]

This is true. Though I'd -hate- to see what the fangirl shippers would try to say bacon and Astroturf symbolized as far as relationships preferences...

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

>_< or the resulting doujinshi that could be spawned from it aswell.

[unrelatedwaffle.livejournal.com]

That's odd, because I think I like green covers more than blue covers. Then again, book covers are so poorly designed in general that I go for the simplest ones. Why can't they be like books in other countries where they're like a durable paperback with flaps built in? I LOVE those!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I would just be happy to have books that didn't fall apart in my hands.

[rachel-renee.livejournal.com]

The reasoning behind the "no green" thing in sales and advertising is simple. People tend to link the color green with sickness. A prominant example of this is car ads. If you watch the commercials, all the cars are either red, blue or silver. These are considered to be the most attractive colors. Only rarely do you see a car of another color especially green without a special gimick attached.

These rules only apply if you are doing "mass market" marketing. If you have a pre-targeted audience the rules do not apply.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I remember the green Mr. Yuck face on stickers you could get in the 70s to put on poisonous substances in your house to warn kids away from them. XD

Hm. So what if you're, say, considering color choices for the spine and cover of volume 2 of a manga? That could, technically, be considered a pre-targeted audience, I guess, but OTOH you're still trying to build an audience for it and attract new readers. Which are, themselves, a fairly small slcie of the general book-buying public. Hrm. I don't know enough about this.

Er, yeah, there's a context for this, but it's under friendslock in someone else's LJ so I won't mention identifying info. :D

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

For the question of spine colors as a reader/collector I say please keep all spines and designs the same color. I hate when my books don't have matching spines. My Vampire Game, Paradise Kiss, Rising Stars of Manga* and some other tokyopop titles are all effected by changing the colors on the spine.
*None of my books are currently unpacked for me to check.

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

I happen to like green >_<

Maybe I should look and see how many green books I have? O_o;

[mothoc.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite book overs ever is the cover to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076530953X/qid=1136841634/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-0605144-3423369?n=507846&s=books&v=glance). it's also rather virulently green.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

There's also a certain edginess and self-conscious hipness (er, for want of a better word) with Doctorow, the same thing that's in Brett Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, and Nabokov, the other three authors I mention as having large green elements. Which doesn't really fit with, say, shoujo manga, I think. Well, the cover of volume 5 of Hot Gimmick is a virulent eye-popping green, but it's a series you love to hate, the covers have more obvious graphic design than others, and it's #5 in an already-popular series. Hrm. *ponders*

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Hmm, we did a book cover predominantly green (our first BUG book) and while we didn't make millions we did manage to sell off our stock?

I could see it being associated with illness?

I don' thave a great sampling of books in the office but I notice that out of all my text books I only have one reen book, for Macromedia Dreamweaver, but Dreamweaver is coded green for the company anyways.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If I go back to what rachel_renee says, you've got a pre-defined audience anyway, so the predominant color on the book may not be as much of an attractant or repellant as it might be otherwise. Hm.

What I really ought to do, if I ever had the money to whiffle away on it, is do a print run of something with different-color covers, and track which ones sell better. XD

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Being colorblind, I'm no expert on colors, but I can give you one piece of advice: You want your book to pop out at the casual bookstore browser. So be sure the title is visible from a distance and make the text of your name and the book title contrast against the background image. Then, include a graphic which will draw the reader in once they wander into the store to take a look at it.

There's a book out called "Penguin by Design (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0141024232/qid=1136844315/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-8490214-4424836?n=507846&s=books&v=glance)" by Phil Baines. This review (http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2005/sep/16books.htm) covers the concept in a bit more detail..

More clearly visible titles are important to increase buzz and popularity as well: the Guardian ran an article last October in which UK readers discussed their desire to be seen with the latest shortlisted book. They may not have been reading The Da Vinci Code, but they were carrying it around to fit in with the mainstream.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

In terms of manga, I note that Fruits Basket has a fairly simple cover: each one features one character, full body, sitting down. It might be interesting to sit down with the year's top-selling and worst-selling manga titles and just look at the covers to see what can be seen. *makes note of that as a possible future essay topic*

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Interesting! :) If I had time, I'd love to obsess over an essay like that.

BTW, publishers also advise new authors not to publish their books with white covers because they scuff and show dirt too easily. (My copy of Blink is only a month old and it already looks awful.) Yellow covers tend to fade, and ones with strictly low-contrast patterns (herringbone?) might give off a moire pattern in photography or on (tv) camera.

From a publicity standpoint, the cover also needs to look crisp and clear when printed in black and white: most book review sections do not print covers in color. For that matter, local bookstores don't print their book-signing flyers in color, either. :)

Oh, and if you're selling via Amazon, you might consider how the cover looks as an LJ icon. Amazon's book thumbnails are even smaller than that. Is the title still legible at that size?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It's not me, it's someone else. I'll have to point them over here for the questions. XD

I'd never thought about the B&W thing. That makes a lot of sense.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

:-D Ah.


*nod* The b&w thing is a major annoyance. Some color photos actually develop a moire pattern when they're converted to grayscale.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. :) It's a creator who's debating different versions of a cover, but it's under friendslock, so I'm respecting wishes for anonymity. :) But it's interesting and useful information to have, at any rate, so I'm glad I posted it. :)

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

I always printed covers out in black and white to see what the contrast was like for the colorblind and in b/w publications.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

I had heard the no-green rule at some workshop or other.

More exceptions: Dragonflight had a violently green cover from, what, the early '80s? until the last round of reprints a year or two ago. Again, though, a book that would have sold wrapped in Astroturf. Dragonbone Chair and The Mermaids Singing are also predominantly green and sold very well.

However, the fact that we can sit here and enumerate the green books of our acquaintance is pretty sad.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

There's a bookcase crammed with fiction to my left, and I can see a grand total of four (4) green books:

Kate Ross, Cut to the Quick and A Broken Vessel (noting that the spines, which I see, are violently green, but the covers themselves, if they were displayed face-out as in a bookstore, have no green)

Gene Wolfe The Sword of the Lictor (part 3 in a 4-part story)

Diana Wynne Jones' Black Maria

Actually, taking a closer look, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is predominantly green, but .... Astroturf.

The bookcase across the way has a couple of green Terry Pratchetts and an Alexander McCall Smith, but I think the Astroturf element holds true for those, too. Green is definitely in a minority for all of my books.