The pitch in a blink

Last week, I wrote about elevator pitch (yet again). I said (again) that your One True Pitch has a hundred daughters, and some of those daughters are visual.

Your book cover is the most obvious example, but Facebook ads would be another one. And whereas you only get one book cover, you can have a zillion FB ads if you want to (and, erm, if you’re self-publishing. FB ads are a niche that only work for indie authors.) What’s more, those FB ads give you hard numerical data on what works and what doesn’t – and part of my email last week suggested that if the elevator pitch isn’t properly expressed in the image, then it won’t ultimately succeed in terms of sales.

I’d say that, on the whole, my data bears that out. (And some books have a much simpler way to express their elevator pitch in visual terms. Those books are easiest to advertise.) 

Now, that’s all jolly interesting but: 

1. Lots of books won’t get FB ads (because they may be trad published by publishers who focus on print sales). 

2. The success of a book is more heavily determined by a cover than by the ads: if you have a lousy cover, no marketing in the world will save the book. 

3. And the book cover is the older, more senior daughter. The look of the cover has to determine the look of any advertising campaign (and, in fact, any visual materials produced in any context), because all those visual materials have to set up the right expectations: “This is the thing we want you to buy.” 

So what works for a book cover? Well, a strong pitch, visually expressed. 

As I said last week, you can’t necessarily get the entire pitch into a visual and you don’t have to. You just have to make sure that the pitch and the image are extremely consistent. You need to feel the pitch at least partially expressed in the cover. 

And, because the most arresting element of any cover is the title, then you really want to think of the cover as being the sum of Image and Title with those two things working harmoniously with one another. 

Here’s an example of all that working p-p-p-perfectly:

The book is a big bestseller by my colleague, Becca, who’s Head of Marketing and Membership at JW Towers. 

I don’t know exactly how she would frame the elevator pitch, but it’s something like: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin + letters from a previous wife. 

That’s a pretty damn solid elevator pitch, and it’s right there on the cover. 

Woman? Yes, in massive text. 

Remote cabin? Yes, in massive text and as the lead element of the visual. As a matter of fact, the text ‘cabin’ could mean some kind of beach-side cabin that’s part of a group of 100 or more. This artwork makes it damn clear: this cabin is remote. It’s alone. It’s isolated. 

Creepy guy? Well, no… but also kind of yes. The man doesn’t feature in the title or in the image, but you sort of feel him there. The blue and yellow colour tones in the cover have become a kind of uniform for psychological thriller books. The creative part of me never loves a uniform… but they’re definitely a sweet and lovely guide to genre. They’re another way to convey information. And here, the blue and yellow (and the twilight), all say, “creepy domestic drama.” So yes, there’s a creepy man around here. You’d feel kind of baffled if you picked the book up and he wasn’t there in the blurb. 

Letters from the wife before? OK, this is not in big text and it’s not an element in the image. (Nor should it be: it would just look awful if there was some handwritten letters layered onto the image somehow.) But – well, you have your shoutline to play with, a subtitle, in effect. And that doesn’t mention letters, but it does strongly hint in that direction: “You’re not the first. Will you be the last?” Nine words that complete delivery of the pitch. 

The cover + image delivers the whole damn pitch, perfectly. 

Books almost never sell at real scale unless they deliver a great reader experience, so I don’t want to pull any praise away from Becca’s actual writing. (I’ve just started the book: I’m 50 pages in and loving it.) 

But Becca tells me that the publisher of this book at one stage contemplated changing the title and the cover design. The title was going to be “The Woman Before” and the image was going to be of someone washing up. 

You can kind of feel the thinking going on there. This is a domestic drama. Maybe lean on the last part of the elevator pitch more heavily, the idea that this current wife is successor to an unknown previous one? 

But Becca pushed back, and she was right to do it. The remoteness of the location was absolutely central to the pitch. If you had to trim the pitch down to three elements, not four, it would be: 

Woman + creepy guy + remote cabin.

The book sells because of teasing the reader: what would it be like to be a woman, alone in some remote place, with a guy whom you now find creepy? The previous wife just gives you a steer on the particular kind of creepiness involved, but that’s kind of secondary. Woman + creepy guy + cabin: that’s the bit that really matters. 

Oh yes: I will also say that a good book cover should stand at an oblique angle to the title. It should offer a different take, or it’s not really intriguing. 

The most obvious cover here would have been “picture of cabin with woman in window.” But then the reader learns nothing from the cover than they have from the title. Those very literal covers nearly always fall flat. 

When books of mine have failed, the cover has always been at the heart of the failure. 

Here’s the American hardcover of my first Fiona Griffiths book: 

That sort of expresses “woman uncertain of her identity”, but it doesn’t say “this is a crime novel”. It doesn’t reference murder and crime investigation and being a detective.

If you were told this was an existential novel by a French feminist philosopher, you’d probably think: (a) yep, perfect cover, and (b) I won’t buy that until the Ice Age after next. 

Sure enough, that book had stellar reviews… and terrible sales. 

Because sales had been disappointing, the publishers decided on a complete rebrand for the paperback edition. They went with this: 

(That’s a weird second-hand image, because – thank the Lord – my self-published books have now driven these original versions off the market so completely that they’ve become hard to find.) 

And that image still fails. There’s some sense of communication with the dead, yes, but in a séance-type way, not a weird-detective way. 

As a matter of fact, those cutesy suede ankle-boots suggest that what you’re looking at is some sort of women’s fiction based around séances. I mean: there probably IS a niche there, because there’s a niche for almost everything, but if you were a girly-séance sort of reader, you’d be totally put off when you found what kind of book was actually on offer. 

That book sold all across the United States and Canada… and sold fewer than a thousand copies: a figure so low I still find it staggering.  

Just because your eyes are probably hurting from the badness of those covers, here’s the self-pub version of the cover that replaced those two evildoers: 

That cover says: dark crime novel, with a theme to do with the borderline between life and death. That’s good enough: there just isn’t a visually one-stop way to express “murder story involving a detective who used to think she was dead.” 

The cover isn’t the pitch, remember: it’s the daughter of the pitch. You just need to see a strong family resemblance. 

That’s it from me. 

In Delightful Child News, I will just tell you that my elder daughter has created the most excellent word, confuzzling, for anything that is confusing and puzzling. It’s kind of a genius word, and I heartily recommend its adoption. 

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY is going on holiday…

As you probably know, we’ll be doing some serious tinkering with Townhouse over the next couple of weeks. Our aim is to improve it for our members, both Premium and free – but that means it’ll be going offline on Monday 28 July.

Feedback Friday is glad you folks will be getting a shiny new space to connect in, not least because it means she can have a well-deserved rest.

She’ll be back on 8 August, slightly sunburnt, in her snazzy new home. 

Til soon. 

Harry