{"id":90933,"date":"2024-03-01T11:59:43","date_gmt":"2024-03-01T11:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/?p=90933"},"modified":"2024-03-01T11:59:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-01T11:59:43","slug":"the-comeliest-daughter-walking-the-talk-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/the-comeliest-daughter-walking-the-talk-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"The comeliest daughter \u2013 walking the Talk IV"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today, I put on a pair of deerskin breeches, a red coat with tails, and a kepi, adorned with a fistful of white ostrich feathers. Thus adorned, I present:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An extremely short, but beautiful email<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Cover Design \u2013<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the fourth email in a loosely bundled series on Walking the Talk: an attempt to show you guys how the things I yap on about in these emails actually translates into the decisions I make as a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So: cover design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my boxes, owl & imp email on elevator pitches<\/strong><\/a>, I wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe cover quote and the book blurb and the cover design and the query letter and all those things: they are the daughters of your elevator pitch. They spring from it, but they are not it.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s true. The elevator pitch is the magic juice which underlies everything else. Literally every time your manuscript touches the world, the elevator pitch should inform what that touch looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the pitch doesn\u2019t necessarily have to dominate \u2013 it just has to play its part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cover design is probably the single clearest illustration of this. Yes, a cover design can\u2019t be at war with the elevator pitch \u2026 but the first job of the cover design is to get someone to explore the book<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cover designers (understandably) always want authors to look at the full, 4 quadrillion megabyte version of their cover image, and ideally on a 96\u201d screen. That, for sure, is the best way to admire the cover designer\u2019s art. But in practice, the most significant role of the cover design is as a thumbnail on an Amazon selection screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that stage, the thumbnail\u2019s job is mostly: \u201cInduce someone to click through to the book page itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u2019t completely ignore the elevator pitch: if you stick a sign in your shop window saying \u201cBrilliant new summer dresses at 75% off\u201d, there better blooming well be some summer dresses inside the shop when people walk in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Same thing with the cover design. There needs to be reasonable continuity between the promise made by the thumbnail and the more detailed view offered by the book details page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if you had to rank the order of priorities here, it\u2019s something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#1 Goal<\/strong> Attract readers in your genre(ie: get the click)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#2 Goal <\/strong>Honour your elevator pitch<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both goals matter, but the first is more important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I write gritty crime \u2013 so my genre is something like Celtic noir \/ police procedural. Because my book is #7 in a series, a lot of the design decisions are already set. That said, my elevator pitch (covering both the book and the series) is something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n