As a Professional, (not hobbyist Graphic Designer) I have seen a lot of great book cover designs and many more inferior ones. But keep this in mind, there is no bad artwork, because creativity is a blessing in itself and outward expression of internal ideas even more so. But everyone’s eyes view and interpret what they see differently, so if this is true than observation might be biased according to the individual’s mind’s eye.
Now with this in point, let us substantiate Art from Marketability and cast pertinent conceptual expression to the wind for the sake of unbiased comparison.
When an author researches my scope of abilities to create a project for their book, website, or any other type of print/web media duties they can only rely on my past experience, satisfied clients and present projects that are available for them to view. Which is the way it should be, however I endeavor to tell my prospective employer that there exists many other elements involved in creating and producing a satisfactory finished product that I utilize.
The main element I strive to incorporate into all my projects is the,”personal conceptual expression”, not mine but the authors.
Feeding off of that, as well as the personality of my authors product/services, I use my professional experience and technique to personalize the project to obtain the anticipated result of the author. This only being the rough draft phase!
Let’s say I am doing a book cover design for a non-fiction title. And the book is about a paperclip, yes that’s right a “paperclip”.
The author wants to market and sell this book with a flashy, pertinent book cover to potentially sell a lot of books. So do I say,”What the hell can I do with a paperclip?“, or do I say,”O.K. let me find out from the author what vital role has this paperclip played in their life?”.
Well it just so happens that the author is blind in one eye and it was the result of an injury sustained as a young child while in elementary school. There it is, my artwork juices are flowing. I can convey artwork as Trauma, Emotions, Anger, Seeded Issues, etc… caused by the,”Paperclip”.
So I envision, after talking and listening to my author, an image of a school desk, an eyeball, a cane made from a paperclip, on and on…
I can imagine forever. Which is an advantage in my business.
So how do I make it marketable? Well I see several avenues. I will research paperclips associated with Trauma, Accident, School, Teachers… So after the research I will target a niche that is pertinent to my visual representation and content of the book. There are so many articles that have meaningless subject matter but the story behind it is what sells. Evolving that text into a visual curiosity, well, that gives birth to marketability. This is just the art concept of it, naturally keywords, meta data, optimization all have their main role in implementing marketing strategies.
Not all designers think alike, just like all books do not read alike. But these are the basic conceptual techniques I use in all my projects, not just Books.
