The Ten Ways - Cover pictures

We want to sell a book so we print a picture of its cover in the advert.   Why?

The answer is "so the teacher can see what he/she is getting" - which is fine except that if you suggested to teachers that they buy books on the basis of the cover they will probably walk out and go and find another publisher.  Maybe some library books are bought on this basis, on the grounds that the cover encourages readership, but that's an exception.  Quite why the cover of GCSE Chemistry or Key Stage 3 Citizenship has to be in the advert I don't know, but most people believe they do.

There are two experiments in this field that reveal a fair amount about covers in adverts.

The first was conducted by the publisher Careerscope - a small careers publisher that produced one or two new careers books a month, and had a back catalogue of around 40 titles.   The standard way of advertising to schools for Careerscope was a single sheet of A4, one colour one side, no illustrations.   

Then a new designer came in, pouring scorn on the poor saps who could be so dopey as to put out this advertising.  Without consulting the management he went over to full colour incorporating pictures of the covers of the books.    The text advertising each book stayed the same.

Sales dropped from around 3% per mailshot to 0.4% per mailshot.   The designer was sacked, the original style was returned to, and sales went back to 3%.

Incidentally what I really remember about this affair was the meeting between the manager of the designer and the MD.  The MD asked why this approach had been adopted - the answer was to get more sales.  But it had produced exactly the opposite results said the MD.   "But it couldn't," said the manager.  "See the results" said the MD passing the print out across the table.   The manager stared at the figures.   "But it couldn't," she said.

It was, in effect, utterly unbelievable that all this extra design andcolour could reduce sales.

Shortly after this I came across a second event which led me to a similar conclusion.   Hamilton House Mailings plc (the company responsible for this site) undertook a trial mailing for a publisher which consisted of a leaflet describing a number of titles and an order form.  There were no illustrations, just white space around each book title headline.

The initial promotion of 1000 schools selected at random went very well indeed and a result the client decided to mail all 23,000 schools in his target group.   

Two weeks after posting the mailing out for him, I took a very angry phone call, suggesting that we had not mailed anything - for the simple reason that no replies had been received.   We looked into the complaint, got out the Royal Mail posting dockets and so forth, and enquired of Royal Mail if they had indeed had any problems.

For several weeks were quite unable to solve the issue, the customer taking the not unreasonable view that if his first mailing had sold 90 books on a mailing to 1000 schools, a mailing that was 23 times bigger could not sell nothing.  I utterly agreed, as was very unhappy about this.

So the matter stood, until the customer called for about the eight time and went through the story yet again, but then added, "and you would have expected this mail out to sell more".

He hadn't said this before, and so I asked why.  He told me.   "The trial run just had blank spaces around the book title, because we couldn't afford to run full colour on just 1000.   The full mailing had full colour pictures."

In short, the original had sold, the edition with colour pictures had not.   If you think I am wrong, I would urge you to do a test.  Do one mailing with pictures and one without - mail them to random selections from the same group, on the same day, and compare the difference.  If nothing else, you will have the pleasure of proving me wrong.   But if I am right maybe I have just enhanced your response rate and saved you a lot of money.