Terry,
Your reply to Martin Salisbury is ill-informed. This is a case of inappropriate statistics. It is easy to measure increased sales. It is not easy to attribute a single cause to that increase. It is not at all “trivially easy to assess whether sales have increased by 20% per month for the book with the new cover.”
The central problem involves the fact that many issues affect book sales. Martin identified some of them. I speak from personal experience as one-time general manager of a modestly famous publishing firm — Something Else Press. The problems we faced included distribution, in-store representation, supply and resupply, and a dozen other factors ranging from marketing and reviews to buyer decisions. Amazon, online intermediaries, and superstores have changed many aspects of the book market, but Martin is still quite right. The cover is only one factor.
It is trivially easy to run comparison tests and split tests for consumer preferences of cover designs. It is not trivially easy to test whether a cover is responsible or can be responsible for increased book sales.
It is demonstrable that cover design and book design can increase book sales as against different covers or books. I say this based on another experience — the successful redesign of a book. The publisher sold far more copies following the redesign. BUT this was the redesign of an entire book, not just the cover. And we understood even then (1989) that there was no real way to compare — massive quantities of the original bad design sold due to interest in the subject matter and clever marketing — along with the fact that the book publisher owned a book club that sold thousands of copies of every title to club members, sight unseen.
It is also the fact that nothing increases sales as much as the ability to control key market factors other than design. Any book designer or cover illustrator willing to work on the kind of contract basis you suggest will not long be in the business. Anyone with a serious understanding of marketing, publishing, management, or statistics can explain why it is impossible to measure whether a new cover design alone can increase sales by 20% per month.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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Terry Love wrote:
—snip—
Thank you for your message. My apologies if there was some confusion.
The reasoning you present is somewhat different from what I wrote.
Let's make it a practical example.
Imagine I have a book in print and being sold. As a publisher I wish to increase sales 20% by changing the cover to a design that is more attractive to customers.
I can ask a graphic designer to create a new cover for the book and specify that the outcome must be that it will increase sales by at least 20% per month, and that the designer must be responsible for the performance of the design to be effective in achieving that outcome.
It is trivially easy to assess whether sales have increased by 20% per month for the book with the new cover.
On the graphic design side, it is easy to create a set of statistical experiments for different cover designs that will give a good idea of whether they are likely to result in more than 20% improvement in sales per month. One of these can be chosen by the designer to submit to the buyer, confident that the designer can fulfil their responsibility for achieving the outcomes.
If the design is effective in achieving the outcome, the designer gets paid, if not, then not.
—snip—
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