Jacket Meeting

It started with a briefing about books to be published next year March. In other words they were recently acquired and being pitched to the rest of the company. One was a book combining elements of poker with body language. Examples of other books on poker published by competing companies were shown to the designer and general ideas for the kind of jacket design that was wanted were discussed. The designer will come with some ideas in the next few weeks and they will then be discussed. Due to a key accounts meeting being held this Friday, some of these books, which are lead titles should be as close to being finished as possible. Close to being finished here refers strictly to having a title and a finished jacket.

Some of the ideas that were pitched by the designer sparked some interesting debate concerning font, background colour, general theme, etc. Literally every detail, down to the smallest speck of colour can be immensely significant in the overall ‘feel’ the jacket gives off. The marketing, sales and production directors were there along with two of the publishing directors and the publicity manager, Caroline. Individual editors would then be the ones in charge of briefing their titles (like the poker book above) and this generally included explaining the title, explaining some proposed designs, ideas, etc.

To publish a successful book you don’t even really need to come up with a new idea. As a matter of fact, most successful books nowadays are the complete opposite of original. Part of taking of it is taking old ideas and making them sell and that is a skill more difficult then it seems, especially if you don’t want to plagiarise. “Commercialize the content”. A maternal guide book is discarding its orthodox jacket design of having the author on it, in favour of an illustrated chick-lit design. The reasoning behind this is that they are fashionable, trendy and basically sell a hell of a lot of copies. It is still considered risky though if the author is Gina Ford, the biggest name in parenting books.

The advantage of using the same designer is that initial instructions may be minimal, as he/she will have a pretty good idea of what is expected. On the other hand though jackets can sometimes be too similar and recognizable and “fresh hand” and new ideas may actually be the best option for certain books.