The Art of Writing: How to Write Bestselling Novels

Cover Design Psychology

How many covers have you swiped right through, barely giving them a thought, because they just didn't capture your attention?

Well, there are good reasons for that, most of which you'll learn in this chapter.

Subconsciously, you have certain triggers that intrigue you, causing you to stop and be drawn in.

Publishers are very good at what they do--sell books. And they've spent millions upon millions to research how to grab your attention so you'll buy their authors' books.

What they found is that each genre has certain visual cues that grab each person who typically reads each one of those genres. That's why every romance novel has a muscled shirtless man, or more commonly his torso, and often a beautiful woman on its cover. Subconsciously, the potential reader viewing the book feels that she could be that woman, if only vicariously, for a little while. This pulls at her deep subconscious need to feel loved by a man she desires because she doesn't actually love herself deep down.

The publisher is exploiting the woman's subconscious desire to be loved, which, in my opinion is, cruel and underhanded because they're using the woman to make money. If they can draw in teenage girls like Wattpad does with their constant seductive covers, they can chemically addict their readers at a young age to reading their romance novels. I know that sounds weird, but just seeing the cover of the book affects your brain chemistry due to the emotions it evokes in you. The earlier that process starts, the more addicted they can get you for the rest of your life. Are you starting to see the power of the psychology of cover art? Are you starting to see how shady Wattpad is with all of its "romance" novels teen girls can so easily access and read? Are you starting to feel used? You should be...because you're being targeted for your money, and they're toying with your emotions, bent on addicting you to their books. Sounds bizarre and unreal, but that's exactly what their research has led them to.

This just took a dark turn, didn't it? But we can turn that around.

Sadly, that's the publishing industry today and the romance genre is the highest-selling genre. If you're going to sell books, especially books that exploit the subconscious of your readers in a more noble way than the romance book industry, which is just porn for females, then you're going to have to learn how to compete with the other book covers out there (preferably in a noble way, but everyone had to make that choice for their self).

**WARNING: If you strictly want to learn book cover design psychology, skip this section...but if you want to see how you can help and learn just a little more about the above subject, check out this next section**

I'm going to challenge you just a little. If you like the challenge, take it. If you don't like it, just ignore it. If you're a female romance writer, don't take offense to my statements above. That's your genre and you enjoy writing it. I'm just being more direct about what it is and how Wattpad specifically is using it against young teen girls. That's not really your fault--it's Wattpad's.

There's a distinct difference between a noble romantic story and a romance novel. The former, most parents would let their fourteen-year-old daughter read. The latter, not so much. In fact, most moms would be embarrassed if their teen daughter knew what was in their mother's romance novel. It's adult content and it's rampant kn Wattpad. So my challenge to writers who write romantic story lines for young adults is to keep it clean, tasteful, and romantic as opposed to really toeing the line or going way over it. And with your covers, try to do the same. It's important to do what we can to help ours and others' kids not get sucked into addictive things before they become adults. The brain doesn't fully mature until around age 25, and the last part to mature is the frontal lobe, which controls a person's inhabitions (which include their impulses). That's one big reason why teens have a harder time dealing with life than adults. They don't need big companies like Wattpad exploiting their developmental stages. They need people who won't use them for self gain, people who will respect them and help them when they need some direction. They're highly capable and wonderful individuals. We, as writers of every age, have to keep that in mind and decide what kind of writer we're going to be--one who uses her readers weak points for self gain or one who strictly seeks to entertain and teach her readers valuable wisdom through our stories.