I am sure that many of us grew up hearing the advice from our parents that we should “never judge a book by its cover.” I know I certainly heard this many times from my mom. While that is good advice in many areas of life, I discovered it is definitely not true in the modern book business. In our hyper-visual digital world, people unquestionably judge books by their cover. You can write the best book ever, but if it has a bad cover then sales of the book will be disappointing. The initial impression from the cover is one of the most important factors determining whether a person clicks the buy button these days. If you don’t believe me, check out books like “Let’s Get Digital” by David Gaughran or “Self-Publish & Succeed: The No Boring Books Way to Writing a Non-Fiction Book That Sells” by Julie Broad.
After Doug Peterson and I finished writing Back to the Futures we knew it had to not only have an attention-grabbing cover but also one that communicated that this was a different kind of business and economics book. The cover needed to communicate two things—fun and agriculture. We searched for background pictures for over a year and went back and forth on several candidates. But none ever quite seemed to ring the bell for either of us. Then one day while browsing a stock photo site I ran across the “grinning” cow picture on the left. In an instant, I knew I had found the cover picture. It was funny and who doesn’t love cows? Doug agreed the first time he saw the picture too.
From there, the next step was to send the picture to our fabulous cover designer Kirk DouPonce, and let him go to work. He hit it out of the park and produced the cover on the right. His first version was very close to final version, too. We never did the kind of testing you are supposed to do to make sure your cover is a hit with potential readers. I loved the vibe of the picture and that was more than enough for me. And I still love it!
Speaking of cows. What better evidence of how everyone likes cows than this video clip of Queen Elizabeth at a livestock show? “Look, cows!” How wholesome 🐄 ❤️ #thequeen #queenelizabeth #cows #royal #royalfamily #shorts – YouTube This is the reaction I had in mind when people saw the cover of my book Back to the Futures for the first time :).
You can find out everything you want to know about Back to the Futures at the website for the book: Back to the Futures – Scott Irwin (scotthirwin.com)
Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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