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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Make Those Book Covers Work for You

This post is both a standalone post and can be used in tandem with yesterday's discussion of embracing more Passive RA

Covers are created by professional designers to sell a book. Judging a book by its cover is something we should be doing. I have written about how to do exactly this from the perspective of helping readers in this post [which links to others].

As we are slowing offering RA in our buildings once again, we need to embrace covers. As I said yesterday, we need to have as many books face out and on display as possible throughout our buildings to make browsing easier, but we also need to let go of our discomfort with judging books by their covers and start making the very best of them work for you.

Thankfully, there is a resource for this-- Literary Hub. They have a regular series on the best book covers with this link. But, even better, they have this 2018 and this 2019 report on over 70 of the best book covers of each year. You can use these back list options to build displays and identify books to put face out immediately. There are over 140 titles here to choose from.

And the best part, these are not obscure lists. Lit Hub only considers books that are "good" to contemplate their covers. They also include commentary on each cover that notes how it reflects the story. There are some book cover resources that only look at the cover as a piece of art, ignoring the story inside those covers. This is not that resource.

To circle back to yesterday's post, now you have a resource to identify dozens of covers to place on display, face out AND a conversation starter about them all in one place. The publisher paid a professional designer to make a cover to sell the  book, now make it work for you.

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