TITLE
‘How much do book covers influence buyers and how important have designers become?
Looking at Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, why has the book cover been redesigned and published so many times, and how much does this really influence a buyer?
Looking at the history of Penguin, how much have they influenced the process and design of book covers?
ABSTRACT
The direction of my report is still a working progress but at this stage I know that I am going to be concentrating on the design of book covers. I will look at how the role of the designer has changed, how book covers are designed and how much they really influence the consumer. I begun my research by reading ‘Penguin by Design. A Cover Story 1935-2005’ by Phil Baines which really educated and inspired me. I now have an historical knowledge of Penguin, how they came about and how they have remained successful, as well as the ever increasing importance of the graphic designer.
I am going to compare a number of books to see how much the cover influences someone to buy, and how the design forces our brain to make assumptions about the genre and content. I would like to do some consumer testing to see which books are the most popular when only the cover is visible.
I would also like to see what happens when a Thriller/Crime novel is camouflaged as a Romance. Will anyone buy it? Will people be attracted to it? Will people be fooled?
The approach I currently think I will take is to track a single book that has been re-published numerous times throughout various decades. I want to see how the designs have changed over the years and how this reflects what consumers want and how their tastes have changed. I think that the best book to represent this is possibly ‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen. My reasons for this is that in 1811, it was the first book by Austen to be published and since then the cover has been redesigned hundreds of times by numerous publishers around the world. I already have a collection of 50 various covers to print, compare and analyse.
CHAPTER HEADINGS:
The History of Book Cover Design
How it developed into a specialized job
How Penguin paved the way
Contextualise: Social, Economic, Historical
Penguin as a Successful Book Publisher
History of Penguin
Key members/designers
Visual examples
Why has Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility been re-published and the cover redesigned so many times?
I will collect as many visuals of the book covers as possible and I will then compare and contrast them to see if there are any common design elements.
I will then consider how I would re-design the book.
How to Design a Successful Book Cover
What I have found to be a constant within cover design
What Happens when you Disguise a Thriller with a romantic cover?
ACTION PLAN:
Find out what process is used to design book covers
Compare different styles of different publishers
Interview a bookseller
Go to a large bookshop-Borders/Waterstones to see how books are displayed, how much of the book cover you can see-if any, how much impact they need, what does/doesn’t work.
Analyse book covers within each genre to see what design elements are always used.
Finish reading my book about Penguin
Collect some visuals from bookarchive.com
Create a survey?
Analyse my images of Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and compare and contrast the cover designs.
Bibliography:
Wikipedia
http://www.flickr.com/photos/memake/3308996062/
Penguin by Design. A Cover Story 1935-2005’ by Phil Baines
Interview with a book seller
A trip to Borders/Waterstones to see how books are displayed
Buy and read Buy-Ology
Group survey to discover favourite/most interesting book covers
AMY STAPLETON
Hi Amy,
ReplyDeleteReally interesting and has come on a lot. You’ve still got quite a lot in here and need to edit some aspects out to ensure a focused report that answers a key question, rather than something that tries to do too many things and fails to achieve any as a result.
Let’s start with the title. You’ve got at least 4 questions in there – each of which could be your single research question.
In my opinion the strongest question is ‘How do book covers influence book purchasing?’. If you choose this, I would suggest changing it to sthg like: ‘Judging books by their covers: an investigation into the influence of book cover design’.
The stuff about book genre and book cover design genre is really interesting and worth exploring. Publishers deliberately select particular illustrators/styles for types of book so they will ‘sit well’ in the section of the bookshop. Perhaps you could explore whether this is having a detrimental effect on sales of books that hard to define…i.e. that break new ground. Perhaps this is where you can best position your experiments?
It is a really good idea to take a single text and see how it has been done differently through the years and how this has influenced sales/reception of the book. I would argue that you should focus on a text that has been only re-published with the same publisher (i.e. a book that is still in copyright). If you go for an old book such as S&S (over 70yrs old) then it can be published by anyone and you would find it hard to track the influence of design on sales. There would be too many different ones and you would find it difficult to actually get data on them. (If such data exists on S&S then by all means go for it! I’m just worried that it would end up a visual history of the cover of that book but it wouldn’t tell you anything meaningful about how the cover influenced consumer behaviour.).
I suggest you early on go and interview a publisher and could ask them for a good example. I’m not sure you would be able to find out otherwise. Interviewing book-sellers might also be a good idea. I suggest you apply for a work placement with Dorling Kindersley or Penguin for the Autumn term/Xmas. They have people who analyse and test designs on audiences and this could make for an interesting feature. Sophia Tampakopoulos at DK would be a good person to contact: sophia.tampakopoulos@uk.dk.com
How about re-jigging your chapters as:
1) History of book cover design
2) The influence of book covers (focussing on whatever text is easiest to track)
3) Book covers now: content genre = cover genre
4) Designing the perfect book cover
I think the Penguin material from the Baines book could well come into your report, but only as an aspect of a chapter. The Penguin stuff has already been done so there is little point in you repeating it. But it would make for useful source material.
I would delete the stuff about ‘role of a designer’ – as it sounds too generic.
Catherine