Engaging your audience – Book covers determined on Facebook

There are two seasons per year in the book publishing world: Spring (January through June) and Fall (July through December). Twice a year, we compile a list of titles that we will be publishing the following season for our distributor Casemate to present to the book trade. Unlike many publishers, we always engage the author in the process and have many rounds of back and forth to determine book titles, create subtitles, and develop just the right catalog description for each book. This season, we decided to engage our READERS in the process too, and asked for their thoughts as we created the front covers of each book. It was a fun, interactive, and rewarding process.

Step 1: As usual, we collected suggestions from authors of what photos, images, or illustrations they thought should appear on the front cover of his or her book, and looked into acquiring high resolution images and the rights to reproduce each image.

Step 2: After sifting through the options, we posted a book title, subtitle, and potential cover image on our Facebook page every day for one upcoming title, and opened up the comments for a dialog with our readers to get their suggestions, feedback, and thoughts.

Step 3: We took their ideas into consideration, worked with our graphic design to create some wonderful covers, and posted the end results on our Facebook page to complete the process.

Scroll down to read the comments on our Facebook page for the last few weeks. We had a wonderful exchange with a lot of readers who are already looking forward to our 2014 line-up and our Facebook Insights for the past month show dynamite numbers!