I asked a human designer and AI to design my book cover. Which one would you choose?
Views are mine and do not represent my employers
First impressions matter. Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that all it takes is one tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face. First impressions do matter for humans. It is based on the survival skills our ancestors developed. They had to look at a human or animal and decide if it was safe or threatening.
I was curious to know if the first impression of a book has any impact on its popularity. In the case of a book, the first impression is created by the cover.
What is harder - writing a book or ...
My book Dreamers and Unicorns at the Kolkata Airport's bookstore
Yes! Yes! Yes! The design of a book’s cover can significantly impact its popularity. Every author I spoke to said that it is much easier to write a book than to sell a book.
According to 99 Designs, a well-designed cover can increase a book’s visibility by 50% or more. Reedsy, found that professionally designed book covers led to a 35% increase in book marketability.
Every author I spoke to said the same thing. Writing a book is hard. What is harder is getting it across to the reader. Distribution, pricing, the cover design, the title, the readability and the author's personal brand all matter. So having a great cover design is like creating a great first impression. That's harder than you think.
Cover design must convey the genre, tone of the text, the subject matter and the author's personal brand
Trust the professional designers
My book Dreamers and Unicorns started off with my own sketch. Westland Books had their own team of designers. I was adamant that I would use my own artwork on the cover. The designer loved the idea of a unicorn on the cover, but suggested that I show the cover to a few bookstores. The book sellers loved it. But.... they thought it was children's book. No one thought it was book about how "leadership, talent and culture are the new growth drivers". I learnt my lesson. Trust the designers.
When Penguin Publishing Group bought the rights from Westland, they did their own version of the cover as they put it in stores and on Amazon.
For my next book I asked a human designer and AI
I had to tell AI the kind of cover I would like for my book. That is what Prompt Engineering is all about. Prompts tell the computer what to do. Don't miss Ethan Mollick's paper on what AI can and can't do yet.
Here is the prompt I used. And yes, the more elaborate the instruction, the better is the output from AI.
"Create a book cover design for a non-fiction book about Career 3.0 where careers will be like the number 3, with twists and pivots. It must have global appeal. Use book cover design trends of 2023."
My book Career 3.0 generated by AI
Keep in mind, the cover design must convey the genre, tone of the text, the subject matter and the author's personal brand. Then I gave the same instruction to the graphic designer Aakriti Khurana and this is what she created
I LOVED Option A on the left. That's what I am going with
I voted for the human graphic designer's creation for my book cover. Here are my reasons (using my logic)
The yellow and black combination tells you that this is a book about Career.
The black arrow starting from the top left goes on to guide the eye through the 3 on to the 0 and goes on to the right into the future.
Six Skills you must have to Succeed tells you what you should do to manage your career in the Career 3.0 world.
I admit that paused for a minute between option A and B. For that I had to use my intuition and gut feeling to choose. The researchers found that participants who made intuitive, gut-based decisions were more certain of their decisions and more likely to advocate for them. (read the paper)
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