Category Archives: Digital Books

The Cover is Key: Don’t Let Your Book Go Unnoticed

Posted on by under A Publisher's Life, Digital Books, Industry Insights, Marketing Tips

By Michelle Antus, Bookmasters’ Media Design Specialist

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“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

While one of our culture’s favorite idioms is nice in theory, the reality is that it occurs more frequently than we may want. As consumers in a visually driven marketplace, we are constantly judging the contents of a package by its appearance. Think of the last time you bought an unfamiliar product brand. What made you pick it up? Chances are something on the outside of the package caught your attention. A book cover should be no different. It needs to stand out from the thousands of other books in the market.

The cover is the face of the book and is what will ultimately be used to promote the book. People shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but let’s be honest: it happens, and that means the cover needs to be designed well.  Humans are drawn to a solid, eye catching design, whether or not they can articulate why. Having a true professional design the cover is worth the investment.  A good artist will know how to design a quality cover that displays the emotion and theme of the book. The more information and inspiration the designer is fed, the better the cover will be.

Like any piece of good artwork, the cover needs to look good in a variety of situations. A printed, full color cover is only one of the aspects. It can be viewed in both color and black & white e-Readers, print publications, and websites. It also has to pack a punch when it is only 70 pixels wide. When a book is listed online in a search, 9 times out of 10, it will not have a description alongside it and it will be a much smaller version of the cover.

The cover has to be the magnet to pull in the potential readers and quickly and accurately tell them why they should give your book a chance. However, an overly complex design or overly minimalistic design does not always equal a solid cover. A potential reader will only look at a cover for a few seconds before he or she decides if it is worth picking up. If the cover is a mess or fails to engage the passerby, it will be looked over without a second glance. Exceptions to this rule are authors who have sold millions of copies and are a household name, such as J.K. Rowling or William Shakespeare. Once an author has made a name for his or herself, it is easier to bend the rules of design.

Do a bit of research before you jump in to designing your cover. Look at other titles and see what they did, and then don’t look at them again during the design process. Pushing the other cover designs aside makes sure that you avoid copyright infringement on another artist’s work and puts the focus back on your cover and book, and not imitating what others have done. Cover design is not always about having the flashiest and most trendy cover on the market. Let your book’s content dictate the cover. It is obvious when someone tries to force a certain type of cover on their book that doesn’t fit.

The key is to create a cover that fits your target audience and the book’s overall tone. Don’t have a dark, sullen, dreary looking cover if your book is a lighthearted photo collection of fawns frolicking in fields with fedoras. The cover also needs to be engaging to give potential marketers something to work with. The design of marketing material can only go so far to promote the book and the weight of the promotion cannot fall completely on the shoulders of the marketing team. Marketing designs and layouts should complement and enhance the cover, but should not be the focal point. The book cover is what really helps the design shine and is what people will remember most.

Just as the contents of the book are an extension of your brain, the cover needs to be an extension and reflection of the book. Since you can’t physically tell every person why they should buy your book, the cover needs to do that for you. A designer can help you give it a strong voice and let your book shine.

5 tips:

  • Browse other titles in your genre. Look at what makes them succeed or fail. Just be sure not to copy a cover directly.
  • Tell your designer what you like and don’t like about covers you have seen in the marketplace. The more you can articulate your wants and tastes, the better the cover will look.
  • Don’t be afraid to shop around for a designer. Each designer has a set of strengths, so don’t settle for one that doesn’t fit your needs.
  • Engage with a cover that fits the target audience and overall tone, but most importantly, acts as your voice to tell potential buyers why they should purchase your book.
  • A minimalistic cover can be engaging; it just has to be designed well.

Bookmasters’ Bennett Speaks at Tools of Change Conference

Posted on by under Department News, Digital Books, Industry Insights

This morning, Bookmasters’ Larry Bennett participated in a panel at the Tools of  Change (TOC) conference in the session, Have It Your Way!

In the panel moderated by InfoTrends’ Barb Pellow, Bennett joined Larry Brewster (Ingram Content Group Inc.) and Lynn Terhune (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) to discuss how publishers can seamlessly move between print and electronic media and how they can offer customized and unique versions of publications by effectively leveraging technology.

In today’s publishing market, publishers can use technology to manage content, make content, market content, and fulfill content in all forms. The future of print is digital, and publishers must have the ability to respond quickly to the market.

Bennett highlighted that it is important for a publisher to be able to use technology to simultaneously get at both the p- and e-book market and that you have to think about your publishing projects and make wise decisions all along the process of publishing. While there are a lot of elements to successful publishing, working with the right partner and using the right technology are vital.

Larry Bennett is the president of Distribution Services at Bookmasters with responsibility for growing the company’s base of domestic and international print and eBook client publishers.   He also serves as the head of the company’s foreign-language book development and distribution efforts in the United States and abroad.

Prior to joining Bookmasters, Bennett was a vice president at Baker & Taylor, managing its digital print media program.  Prior to that, he managed the foreign language department at Baker & Taylor. In the past, Bennett was president of Public Square Books, a distribution and publishing company, and CEO of National Children’s Book Project, LLC, a children’s book publishing company.  Bennett is fluent in several languages including Spanish, French, and Italian. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

For more about using technology to manage print, see how Bookmasters helps publishers use POD to complement their publishing strategy.

Riding the e-Revolution When Customers Still Desire Print: Flexible Printing with POD

Posted on by under Department News, Digital Books, Industry Insights

bull ridingMany are calling eBooks the future, but what should you, as a publisher, do now while print is still very much in demand?

If you lived in a social media vacuum, you might be tempted to think it is time to do away with print books. eBooks and their rising sales are all the rage. By some reports, Barnes & Noble was selling three times as many eBooks as print books on BN.com. And though Amazon is notorious for not sharing numbers, they have touted throughout the year that they sell more Kindle books than paperbacks and hardbacks combined, with this being compounded in the last few weeks with the release of the Kindle Fire. You would also have heard about several authors that have made large amounts of dough by selling their books only in eBook form.

FUTUReBOOK, the digital blog from Europe in association with Bookseller recently did an article about the 2011 digital publishing timeline. This article featured some very interesting numbers for publishers:

In January, eBook sales in the US comprised 23.5% of all trade book sales. Random house hit 2 million eBook sales in May. In July, Penguin announced that digital sales made up 14% of their overall business. And in August, Simon and Schuster announced that digital sales have doubled for them.

These numbers are wonderful and exciting, but did you notice something? They are not 100%. eBooks are capturing more of the market (and in some cases, growing it), but they have not completely overtaken it. Nor is everyone convinced that they ever will. The point is that whatever happens in the future, print books are still alive and well and necessary!

As a publisher, if you neglect the print market, you are missing out on sales. An excellent way to keep your whole line of printing projects adaptable and manageable is by using print on demand, or POD. Bookmasters has recently added the Océ Jetstream 1000, a digital printer that offers quick, affordable, and quality printing.

With POD, you can print what you need, when you need it. This ensures that you have print books when you need them, but you don’t have large quantities of excess stock in storage while the print/ebook divide is still in flux. This is especially important for publishers with multiple books. Using offset print for books that warrant many copies, combined with smaller digital print runs for books that will have a smaller audience, and POD for books with a very small targeted audience or to keep your backlist alive is a model for success.

Because you may have some books in your list that you know are going to be selling in print in large quantities, meriting an offset print run, you may be wondering how you are going to juggle all these printing contacts. You are in luck. When you work with Bookmasters, you have the flexibility to do offset print runs when you need them, and POD and ebooks. It is a wonderful solution in this time of rapid change in the industry. And it is the kind of partnership that can sustain you as things continue to shift.

With Bookmasters, you can work with one company for all your publishing projects, choosing which services best fit your needs. For more information, call 1-800-537-6727, and see what Bookmasters can do for you.

Photo: Emmett Tullos III, Creative Commons

Support Your Nation, Support Your World: A Printing Choice That’s Good for You and the Environment

Posted on by under Department News, Digital Books

The going green movement is going big. Lots of people and businesses are trying to do their part to reduce their carbon footprint. Admittedly, it isn’t always easy, but every little bit helps.

For a while in publishing, the focus was on paper and biodegradable inks (see what Bookmasters can offer here).  Sometimes publishers shied away from these options because they added cost to the project.

But now you have options that can make you feel good about your impact on the environment, but also make you feel good about your bottom line at the same time.

This fall, we added the Océ Jetstream 1000 to our printing lineup. This machine allows us to offer our publishing partners the ability to do short print runs, or even POD. This means a lot of saved energy.

For one, you print what is needed. Extra energy, paper, and ink are not wasted on production of large quantities of books in need of long term storage. Nor do you have the heating and cooling concerns of storing unsold stock.

Though you can recycle unsold books, it is better not to have large amounts of stock hanging around in the first place.

Further, when you combine POD with Bookmasters’ other services, you get the benefits of working under one roof. You won’t have hundreds of miles of gas consumption spent hauling books from the printer to the warehouse. You might have a few hundred feet of tow motor energy instead. And though we do have offices and partnerships with companies overseas, if printing your books in the United States is important to you, the Océ Jetstream printing option would be a good fit for you.

Plus you can combine your print offerings with eBook using our conversion and distribution services. That pretty much cuts out all the storage, shipping, handling, and recycling concerns. Yet you can continue to have print books, which still comprise a large segment of sales.

Cheers to you for working to make the world a better place! Contact us today to see how we can make your publishing (and environmental) dreams come true.

Photo: Amanda Dowdy, with permission

The BookMasters Group Enters a Partnership with NetGalley

Posted on by under Digital Books, Industry Insights

Beginning April 2011, The BookMasters Group will offer NetGalley services to participating publishers by securely sharing their digital galleys on NetGalley.com. Currently NetGalley has almost 20,000 members composed of reviewers, media contacts, booksellers, librarians, educators, and other professional readers.

All members are able to upload digital galleys on a variety of reading devices including the Barnes and Noble Nook, Amazon Kindle, Borders Kobo, Sony Reader, and Apple iPad or iPhone via Bluefire Reader app. Furthermore, shared galleys can be uploaded to members’ own desktops in a PDF format. To protect publishers’ titles NetGalley ensures all galleys are wrapped with DRM (Digital Rights Management) security.

By offering efficient and cost-effective way of sharing digital galleys, The BookMasters Group will ensure additional exposure for publishers’ titles while gaining valuable reviews from NetGalley members. The official partnership between NetGalley and The BookMasters Group will be commemorated during the week of April 25th when a list of BMG’s titles will be showcased on NetGalley’s home page.