It depends on your leverage when negotiating the contract. If you’ve done another book with this publisher and it did well, and if you have good personal relationships, and if you have a good idea or actual art for the jacket design, you can be influential. Actual approval is rare. It’s usually a matter of influence, compromise, and consensus, with sales and marketing always having the balance of power. Alan

I still hold that image in my mind when I think of the book.

There were subsequent other covers for the same book and I felt lucky to have bought the first one because the cover appealed to me so much.
Just like, as children, we like to have our stories illustrated, as an adult, I like to be able to imagine the cover art into the story or visa versa.

I think a book is something you want to hold in your hand, collect, look at, admire, put on the table or in a handsome bookshelf, so beautiful or artful covers appeal to me tremendously. I don’t want to look at something generic or distressing or embarrassing or ugly or cheesy and I find that books with same old same old get put behind other books. Even though most of my books are not art books or coffee table books, I am really attracted to both beautiful covers that I want to have around me and look at.
Likewise, I am also attracted to intriguing titles.

Also, I went to that site and went over all the titles briefly. My acid test was then to pull up the strongest visual title that I could remember immediately afterward.

When a writer is also an artist, do they get more sayso in the cover decision (not meaning that they have to have their own work on the cover, but some credit for approval?

5,000 copies is midlist? Really? Is there no “lowerlist”?

“The challenge is to find the budget for excellent art . . . ”
So why don’t we save them the time and money by sending publishers our friends/own or freelance artist’s artwork. haha

You make a very good point about book cover design being more important for the new or midlist author who needs attention on the retail shelf or on Amazon. The challenge is to find the budget for excellent art and design when the expectations are less certain. This is when an author, editor, and art director need to be most creative and entrepreneurial in finding inexpensive or stock art.

Alan

But…

>”Do you think any of these jackets helped the book’s success?”

Heck no.

Of course, I think covers are very important but this isn’t a good sampling….Three of the authors – Patterson, Gladwell, and Obama – will sell truck loads of books regardless of their covers. The Patterson and Gladwell covers simply follow the style set for their previous titles. And if you have a book by someone as famous as Obama, then you better put his photo on the cover. (The opposite of that is also true: so many debut non-fiction authors with small platforms want to have their photos dominate the cover, but with an unknown then that’s often not a good idea.) And the teacher guy had so much Internet buzz that it was bound to sell tremendously.

The Last Lecture actually has a great cover and book design but it still would have sold well without, but nice to see the publisher put the effort into the design. And I applaud the publisher for not going with a photo of the dying author on the cover.

I think that book cover design is much more important for the midlist and newer author than for those with astronomical sales.

Anyway, still a great post.