Why I judge every book by its cover.

First I need to start by giving an inspirational tip of the hat to Malcolm Gladwell and Blink.  His ability to break down cause and effect relationships into concise examples is astounding. 

We are all familiar with the adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’.  It was never merely a phrase to help with your decision making process at the library, rather a motto as to how to judge and evaluate people and your surroundings.  I can hear my mother now scolding me as I scoffed at a homeless person asking for change, explaining that just because they had dirty clothes and lived in a cardboard box didn’t mean they were a bad person.  At the time it seemed like a valuable life lesson, but now it seems like a low level attempt to seem open minded and non judgmental.  No offense mom.

Today I take the exact opposite approach, not just in books, but people and my surroundings alike.  This is an idea that Malcolm Gladwell describes as thin slicing.  He illustrates a person’s innate ability to accurately judge a person’s character within seconds of meeting or even seeing them.  This is a very complex theory that Gladwell discusses in over 200 pages in his book Blink, so I will leave that detail to the expert.

The part that I do want to discuss is actually judging books…by their covers.  In the age of fast marketing, flashy graphics and branding strategy, a books’ cover might be the only opportunity the author has to convince a potential reader to pick up their literary interpretation of Web marketing for the small business owner in a mid tier market.  We are overwhelmed by our constantly rotating choices in the stacks at your local bookstore with publications geared towards the most micro of topics.  Most authors do not have the luxury of name power to push their latest piece, so they have to rely on pictures of monkey’s flying out of a computer, or a half naked women to catch my eye.  And if I do happen to pick up your book and the cover screams low budget I will assume the work wasn’t good enough to get picked up by a big publishing house and put through the rigors of brand development.

It is a sad state I will admit, as I would like to think that the little guy still has hope to reach the world with an inspired piece of literature without the financial or graphical support of a publishing monster.  But in today’s over stimulated world you must be just as creative with the outside of the book as you hopefully were with the inside.