Market testing book covers
Book publishing has always been a little backward in some aspects of marketing. For example, while a graphic designer might produce several covers for a book, these are usually reviewed only by a select group of decision makers involved with its production and marketing. I’m not aware of many focus group tests, even for titles that will be receiving massive resources.
Now Bantam Dell is running an online poll to help choose among three different covers for the paperback edition of Ian Ayres’ Super Crunchers (which “explores how detail-rich data and our increasing ability to ‘crunch’ information is changing the way we live”). I suppose it’s a positive step, although I’m not sure that online votes correspond directly to potential sales.
In an extravagant gesture, Bantam Dell will give a free trade paperback copy of the book to twenty lucky winners (a value to the publisher of perhaps a dollar per book in direct production costs, so they are committing some $20 to prizes an an inducement for people to vote) — this is announced by a huge red checkmark together with the words (all caps) ENTER TO WIN, followed by a screamer. I can’t imagine this kind of overselling is effective.
Is one of these covers better than the others?
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Posted: May 19th, 2008 under graphic design, marketing.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Mark
Time: May 25, 2008, 12:21 am
It seems that anyone can enter the poll, which seems to defeat the object of the exercise as the cover needs to attract a particular subset of readers.
Nevertheless, I like the middle one - as it’s cleaner and the ‘How Anything Can Be Predicted’ tag line is intriguing.
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