Awful Cover: When Your Marketing Guru Hates Your Book
Let me just say that I love my cover, and embraced it as soon as I saw it.
The deserted gravel path at night, the faint bursts of light from the lamps. The brooding quality and subtle menace of the dark in the distance.
“I don’t hate it,” he says. “I just think this is the wrong cover for your book. You’re misrepresenting the novel.”
“You can’t advertise your book as a thriller, if the cover has nothing thrilling on it,” the guru says. “You need to show action—a body falling off a building, a burglar climbing a wall in a cat suit. You know, thriller stuff.”
This lands on my head with a thud. “I’m just not a body-through-the-windshield kind of girl. I prefer subtle and creeping menace rather than in-your-face death.”
“Then don’t call your book a thriller,” he says. “Call it a suspenseful mystery with thriller elements.”
“My friends have told me that the book is exciting and thrilling like a thriller.”
“Oh yeah? Well your normal thriller readers have expectations, is all I’m saying.”
Have I mentioned that my marketing guru looks like he’s twelve?
He’s actually quite Zen, and says “fine, nothing is irrevocable.” He then encourages me to go ahead with this misguided cover, “And then, when your sales tank—which they will when you run out of friends to buy your book—we can get a brand new cover with some action on it, and I guarantee your sales will spike.”
He even has a cover designer to recommend, a young buck like himself. We go to this guy’s website where he has a cheesy array of covers, most of which feature two men running, the front man clearly terrified and the guy chasing him looking like he just cleaned out his neighborhood gun store.
“None of these covers are even remotely like my book,” I say. “My book has a female spy breaking into professors’ offices in the dead of night and hacking into their computers.”
The guru’s face becomes animated. “So why isn’t there a computer on the cover, with hands on the keyboard furiously typing, in a dark, deserted office?”
“Now you’re talking,” I say. “I’ll do that for my second cover, you know, when my sales tank.”
My marketing expert doesn’t like my back-cover copy either:
A dead husband. A brilliant hacker. A shadowy world of sex and money in a den of academic intrigue.
“It’s too static,” the 12-year-old says. “I fell asleep while reading it. It needs more action.”
He probably had ADHD as an adolescent.
Still, I’m stung. “What about the escalating threat? And a protagonist who becomes enveloped in danger, a mysterious lodger, a menacing intruder, suspicious and threatening colleagues? And the enveloping tension?”
“It sounds lovely,” he says, “I mean it. But it doesn’t alter the fact that your back cover needs to be more exciting.”
We move on to the price of my book, which I’m proud to say is available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook.
My guru’s opening gambit: “You’re not Michael Connelly, so you can’t charge what he’s charging for his books.
“I have faith in my novel,” I say, my nose in the air.
“And what about $8.99 for the Kindle version?” He takes me for a tour of real thriller writers on Amazon. No one seems to charge more than $4.99, except for Michael Connelly. So the guru has a point. I go into my KDP account and change the price to $4.99.
I refuse categorically to lower the price of my paperback. If I follow the guru’s advice, I’ll be paying my distributor $2 per book sold. So, no.
A Reluctant Spy is my debut novel, and is due out on March 24, just about two weeks’ time!
Here is the postcard—two-sided—that my marketing guru suggested I make.
Please notice the logo for Graveyard Press, my publisher.
The marketing expert wasn’t such a bad egg, and he listened to my protestations with good humor. He actually gave me some excellent advice.
Stay tuned for the next episode: WHEN SALES TANK.
By the way, if you fancy a suspenseful mystery with thriller elements, and you need a break from Michael Connelly, well…I’m just saying…