Dressing for the job you want

This month – genre.

It’s the theme of our Premium Membership events. (Join us today to access them.) It’s the theme of this and the next few emails.

And today: we’re getting dressed up, in a cover design of course, aiming for the sweet, sweet job of jumping from bookshelf to cash till.

Before that, though, a reminder. Some books have classic genres, easily identifiable by the title of the bookstore shelf: crime, romance, SF, fantasy, Middle Grade fantasy, or whatever. Most books don’t. They just live under a shelf that says, ‘Fiction’, which isn’t a genre at all.

And yet – everything has its basket.

If your book is a comically-inclined story about a plump Scots fishmonger who finds love on safari, then your sisters-in-genre are:

• Relationship-led
• Contemporary
• Gentle / comic
• Heart-warming
• Especially any such books that have a dash of foreign travel.

That’s not a genre exactly, but for most purposes (including today’s) those are the walls that define your space. All books have some such walls and understanding those is crucial to you as a writer and you as a book-publisher.

Now, we’re going to approach things backwards and will start at the end. Assume your book is done and dusted. If you’re self-publishing, you need to commission a cover. If you’re not, you still need an emphatic sense of what cover does or does not look right for your book. Publishers don’t always get these things right and the most certain way to murder your book’s chances is to end up with a weak cover. For that reason, I generally advise that authors are permitted One Big Strop per book published and, in most cases, that Strop – if you need to use it at all – is reserved for a fight about book covers.

OK. So: every book has a genre. And you’re in charge of choosing its cover.

There are two lethal mistakes that far too many authors make here.

Mistake #1: “I want my cover to look original.”

Mistake #2: “My cover should reflect my book.”

Neither thing is true, and the first mistake is very dangerous.

The purpose of a book cover is to incite engagement. That’s it.

In a physical bookshop, the cover needs to say, “Hey, reader, I’m the sort of book you generally like, so pick me up and turn me over.” On Amazon, the cover says the same kind of thing, except here the engagement involves a click through to blurb instead.

At this delicate moment in the reader-journey, the reader has no information at all, except what book cover (and title) supply. So the job of the cover is just to make sure that your book pitches up in, broadly speaking, the right sets of hands.

If you’re writing, gritty crime, the cover needs to say, first and foremost, ‘I’m gritty crime.’

If cosy crime, the cover needs to say, ‘I’m cosy crime.’

And so on.

Lots of cosy crime readers may pick up your book and put it down again. That’s life. Don’t worry about it.

There may be readers of police procedurals who might, as it happens, enjoy your cosy crime. But you need to ignore them, because if you start to drop in ‘police procedural’ type signalling into your design, it will confuse the signals to the people who are in fact core.

You need to find the heart of your market – your genre, in fact – and plant your book there.

For the same reason, it hardly matters if a book does or does not reflect your content. One of my more successful covers in the Fiona Griffiths series was a picture of a tree. The book gave no special role to a tree. The tree was relevant to nothing. But the styling said, ‘Dark, commercial, atmospheric crime’ and that spoke to the book’s core audience. That’s was all that was needed.

So the job of that cover is to signal what group of readers you are looking to attract.

That’s it. Nothing more.

Once your cover has secured the reader’s first tentative engagement, then of course further bits come into play. Your blurb then needs to do two things:

#1: It needs to reinforce the genre message. If you’re writing cosy crime, the blurb needs to say, in effect, ‘You picked this book up because the cover told you that I’m all about cosy crime – and that’s 100% true. If you like old people and cats and quilting and some not-very-scary murders, then this is exactly where you want to be.’

#2: It needs to introduce the specifics of the story – where’s the book set? Who are the characters? What’s the premise? But those things all have to cohere (looking backwards in the reader journey) with the message of the cover and also (looking forwards) with the experience that the book itself will deliver.

And that’s it. That’s pretty much all you need to know about genre packaging.

As I say, even if your genre is floaty (plump-Scots-fishmonger-on-safari type floaty), you still need to find the heart of that genre when you figure out the cover.

Genre sells books. That’s why it matters.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Title

What’s your cover design? What’s your title? Does that communicate genre? When you’re ready to share, post in the Townhouse forum.

I know very few people will actually have a cover design to hand, and that’s fine. But say something about what kind of thing you’d like to see. And if you’re writing a thriller and your cover design is just “burly male silhouetted against burning urban landscape” that’s completely fine. Is that a totally unoriginal cover design? Yes.

Does it instantly and precisely talk directly to your target audience? Yes.

So it’s a good cover.

Til soon.

Harry