At our July 8 meeting, we’re thrilled to welcome book design guru Joel Friedlander, who will be delivering a presentation called We All Judge Books By Their Covers — How to Create Book Covers That Work.
Whether you’re selling online or at a bookstore, your cover is the first thing readers see and it’s a critical tool for marketing your book.
We’ll look at covers that succeed — and ones that fail. You’ll learn to recognize the four common problems that doom many self-published book covers, and three simple conceptual tools that will help you attain a book cover that works.
The morning session will be a presentation focusing on the five jobs your book cover needs to do:
- Announce its genre
- Telegraph its tone
- Explain its scope
- Generate excitement
- Establish a market position
In the afternoon session, we’re going to put our learning to the test by doing live critiques of book covers, and we’re seeking brave souls who would like to get feedback on their covers. Long-time BAIPA volunteer and former board member Ruth Schwartz — the book midwife who has designed many book covers — and I will be joining Joel for the workshop and we welcome participant feedback. (We promise to do our best to be gentle and helpful.)
In the morning session, we’re also hoping to do one or more book cover makeovers, which we’ll need to work on in advance.
If you are a current BAIPA member and you’d like your book cover to be included in the book critique workshop and/or the makeover, please send me a note at [email protected] and include a jpg of your cover that is ideally about 800 pixels wide, so we can project it on the screen.
We’ll look at as many as we can in the time we have. Deadline for submissions is July 1.
Hope to see you in July. We’re going to have fun.
