Lee Thompson, who designed the cover shown above for Humdrumming, has some interesting things to say about book cover design:

Book covers these days have to fulfill a great many tasks, and this can result in a struggle over the author’s vision and the publisher’s bottom line. For most authors, the whole joy of writing comes from others reading and benefiting from the author’s words, and money is often secondary. If authors were only interested in money, most of them wouldn’t write!!

The dichotomy comes in that publishing houses are, at the end of the day, a business. A business that’s part of a £16bn ($30bn) industry in the UK, with lots of competition and a broad marketplace for potential sales. When you look at the business structure and costs behind printing, storage, distribution and promotions, each title needs to sell well not only to earn back the advance paid to authors but also to recoup the thousands (in many cases hundreds of thousands) spent on getting the book into stores. I think there are few authors out there who have a full appreciation of these processes and that can often lead to frustration on their part.

It’s an irrefutable fact that everyone “judges a book by its cover”. As much as we’d like to think the merits of the book will shine through, if the cover is appalling, the sales will reflect that. So on that business level, the cover has to stand out in a book store. Recent research (published in this week’s Bookseller magazine) has shown that most readers are becoming less and less influenced by general cover quotes, so the art has to be distinctive.

Read the rest of his piece at Celebrity at Work.