The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

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The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

Issue #099

| The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

99 Covers But These Ain’t The One…

I Got 99 Covers But These Ain't The One: Return to Real Book Cover Revealed. (Now I Need YOUR Help...)

Ryan Levesque

11 min read

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First things first….
 
Happy Mother’s Day!
 
If you are a mom, I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day  :-)
 
Second…
 
I’m hoping I can ask for your help with something today.
 
Because after many many rounds of book cover designs for Return to Real…
 
I’m officially down to the final four cover variations…
 
And I really need YOU to help me choose the FINAL COVER for the book.
 
(More on how to do that in just a moment…)
 
First, the story behind HOW this cover came to be is one filled with…
 
Twists and turns…
 
Embarrassing attempts…
 
And a distinctive cover I had to kill…
 
Here’s how it all unfolded…

1 | My First Cover (Please don't laugh...)

A few weeks ago, in [Issue #092], I introduced the work of Chip Kidd, arguably the most famous book cover designer alive…
 
You may remember ALSO recall that Kidd has a framework he uses to evaluate every book cover that crosses his desk:
 
The “Clarity + Mystery” Equation.
 
Clarity means showing the viewer exactly what something is.
 
Mystery means giving them just enough to make them curious.
 
Too much clarity and you’ve got a textbook.
 
Too much mystery and nobody knows what they’re looking at.
 
The best covers have the perfect tension between both.
 
This FIRST cover FAILS this test.
 
Now, to be fair…
 
My thinking behind this design direction was reasonable:
 
This is a book titled Return to Real.
 
So the cover has to be…. REAL.
 
Not a stock photo. Not AI. So my instincts were to pull from images genuinely shot on the farm where the book was actually written. Like this one here:
That’s me. Walking down one of the trails on our farm. This is a REAL photograph. This is a REAL path. And I am a REAL human.
 
(Check out my snazzy pants.)
 
This photo checked every box I’d given myself.
 
I shared the cover design with a trusted friend who has extensive book experience.
 
His response:
 
“Bro… this looks like a Christian lit journal.”
 
Ugh. He was right.
 
It was a beautiful photograph that promised the wrong book entirely.
 
Anyone picking it up would expect a devotional.
 
And every other farm photo I tried had the same vibe…
A reader looking for the book I actually wrote…
 
(A deeply researched argument about market dynamics, the great AI dilemma, and human provenance in the post-AI economy…)
 
…Would walk right past it.
 
Which takes us to the FIRST lesson I learned in this whole process:
Lesson #1: You might be the worst possible judge of your own book cover.
Here’s why:
 
As the author of your book, YOU already know what’s inside your book.
 
But everyone else only knows what the COVER is telling them.
 
In other words…
 
You know TOO MUCH.
 
That’s when I realized that I couldn’t do this on my own.
 
I needed to bring in a professional…

2 | Hiring The Master.

For round two, I hired one of the most well-known and well-respected book cover designers working in the industry today.
 
The kind of designer with dozens of best sellers to their name.
 
The ten-page design brief I provided was detailed and specific.
 
Here’s an excerpt:
 
“Please make this distinct from Ask and Choose. This isn’t part of that series. This is a deeper, more nuanced book. A big-idea book, deeply researched, written at a different register. The cover needs to telegraph that.”
 
Little did I know, this was about to send me down a rabbit hole…

3 | The Design Rounds.

What followed was one of the most intense, rollercoaster creative collaborations I’ve ever been part of…
 
Here’s how it went.
 
Step 1: I provided the competitive landscape.
Step 2: I provided a reference set to model.
Step 3: First round came back.


None of the designs followed the brief. :-/

They might’ve worked for a cookbook. Or a book about elementary school. Or a book about painting. But they didn’t work for the book that I wrote.

So I responded with even more detailed direction.
 
Step 4: Second round came back.

The next round?
 
Missed the mark even further.
 
Each cover was reminiscent of a vintage nature paperback. Or a midcentury naturalist memoir.
 
This design round didn’t signal the type of in-the-moment thought leadership I was trying to express. Nor did it convey the actual genre of the book.
I felt deflated.
 
I felt stuck.
 
My instincts were to micro-manage the designer even more than I already was.
 
“What if we tried this typeface? What about that color?”
 
But before hitting send on my next round of feedback, I stopped and asked myself a question:
 
Maybe I’m the problem here??
 
Why am I trying to do the thing I just hired the best person in the world to do?
 
So I made a deliberate decision.
 
I stepped back. Surrendered creative control. And told the designer:
 
I think I might be the problem. Do what you do. I will get out of your way.
 
Out of that surrender, a distinctive idea emerged…
Lesson #2: People don’t know what they want. But they DO know what they don’t want.
This is a core ASK Method principle.
 
It’s true for customers in surveys. It’s true for readers buying books. And as it turns out, it’s true for authors evaluating their own book covers too.
 
I couldn’t have told the designer what I wanted. Not coherently. Not in advance. Not in a brief.
 
But every time the designer showed me something? I could tell them with absolute precision what was wrong.
 
That’s the messy, non-linear, frustrating, beautiful shape of a real creative process.
 
And it’s how we ended up with this next design…

4 | The Beautiful Wrong Cover.

I want you to sit with this cover for a moment.
 
The red signs. The weathered wood. The white-painted lettering. The arrows pointing… somewhere.
 
The first time I saw it, I thought, “Okay. This could be it.”
 
It’s bold. It’s distinctive. It stands out on a shelf. It has a real point of view. It would never be confused with another book on the table at Barnes & Noble.
 
I showed it to a few people whose taste I trust unconditionally.
 
The reaction was strangely consistent.
 
“This is a really distinctive cover… But is it really the right cover for the book you actually wrote?”
 
Each one had a slightly different way of saying it. But they were all basically saying the same thing.
 
And they were right.
 
A reader who would love what’s inside Return to Real wouldn’t pick up a book with this cover. The signs felt rural-Americana. Rustic roadside-attraction.
 
And maybe worse: a reader who would pick it up this book based on this cover would feel misled by what’s actually inside…
Lesson #3: A beautiful cover that promises the wrong book is worse than an ugly cover that promises the right one.
This cover represented excellent design. The craft was master-level. The kind of work most authors would have been thrilled to put their name on.
 
Which is why killing this cover was probably the hardest single decision of the whole project.
 
It’s also what brought me to a design direction I’d had imagined back on day one.
 
One that up until that point, I had completely suppressed…

5 | The Instinct I'd Resisted.

When I first embarked on the project of writing this book, and when I imagined what the cover of this book might look like, I had a definite vision in my mind…
 
It was visually closer to Ask and Choose.
 
But with an elevated design treatment that signaled this was a VERY different kind of book, with higher aspirations.
However, I had suppressed that instinct.
 
I feared the cover design would be “too close” to my previous books, and that readers would think it was a continuation of that series…
 
In fact, I made the first point in my design brief clear:
 
“Make this distinct from Ask and Choose.”
 
I had decided that “distinct” meant “throw out the visual lineage.” Different fonts. Different palette.
 
Different everything.
 
But after the red signs got rejected by the people I trust most, I finally sat with the question I should have asked myself weeks earlier:
 
What if my initial instinct was right and my rationalization was wrong?
 
Here’s what I realized.
 
The cover doesn’t need to look DIFFERENT from Ask and Choose. It needs to look like the book I actually WROTE.
 
And the book I actually wrote is a completely different animal from those first two.
 
Ask had a handful of references. Return to Real has over 150. The writing is more researched. More nuanced. More mature. In places it reaches for something lyrical. A quality my first two books didn’t come close to even touching.
 
The cover needed to telegraph all of that.
 
It needed to look like what it actually is.
 
A cover can sit comfortably alongside Ask and Choose on a shelf and still signal that the work inside is something more.
 
The differentiation lives in the cover art, the typography, the subtitle treatment. Not in throwing out the visual DNA entirely.
 
In fact, abandoning the visual lineage entirely is what landed me with:
 
A Christian lit devotional in Round 1.
 
A 1960s paperback nature novel in Round 2.
 
And a rustic roadside-Americana riddle in Round 3.
 
When I went back to my instinct, the answer arrived almost immediately.
Lesson #4: Your first instinct is often right. Trust it.
By the way, there’s a strange poetry in this…
 
This is, after all, a book about returning to what’s real.
 
The cover process itself ended with me returning to the instinct I’d dismissed.
 
The initial design direction I had envisioned when I first embarked on the project of writing this book.
 
Which brings us to….

6 | The Final Design.

It was the instinct I’d had since nearly day one.
 
Simple design. Classic typography.
 
A cover centered around a single object.
 
In this case…
 
An object I’ve been carrying with me, literally, since the moment I wrote about it in the book itself.
 
Something deeply personal.
 
Something important enough to this book that, nearly a year ago… I thought… maybe THIS is what should be on the cover?
 
Yet, I’d talked myself out of trusting that for almost a year.
 
But now my thinking was clear.
 
So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
 
I created dozens of iterations.
 
Worked on composition. Background. Typography. Color.
 
I could feel it getting closer.
 
When I had something I was finally proud of, I brought in a world class designer to refine it.
 
Together, we landed on nine polished variations of the same core idea.
 
Simplicity on the far side of complexity.
 
We then narrowed those nine down to four finalists.
 
Four covers I genuinely love.
 
All of them.
 
And this is where I need your help.

7 | The Ask. (This Is Where I Need YOU)

Here’s the favor.
 
I have 4 final cover variations.
 
I love all four. And that’s the problem.
 
I need fresh eyes.
 
And I’d like to ask YOU for help.
 
I’ve posted the four cover variants here on Facebook:
And I would love to know which one is YOUR favorite??
 
You can click to that post to see the un-blurred covers.
 
 
In that post, to vote for your favorite, all you need to do is leave a comment with two things:
 
  1. Your favorite cover variant (A, B, C, or D).
  2. And (optional), any element combinations you’d love to see. (e.g. “I like the subtitle from B with the author block from D.” That kind of thing.)
Even if you only have 30 seconds, an A/B/C/D in the comments would mean the absolute WORLD to me.
 
AND by clicking on that link above, you’ll get to see the final cover design :-)
* * *
Before we wrap…
 
One week from today is [Issue #100] of The Digital Contrarian.
 
That’s the issue where “Behind the Scenes of a Book Launch” officially begins.
 
I thought it was only appropriate to line things up with a milestone issue like #100.
 
So starting next week…
 
I’ll be taking you behind the scenes of everything I’m doing with this book launch… Everything I’m experimenting with. Everything I’m learning along the way. Lessons learned and mistakes made.
 
Whatever book cover wins the vote…
 
Is the cover that will posted everywhere.
 
I would LOVE that decision to have your fingerprints on it.
 
Here’s the link to cast your vote one last time:
 
 
Okay, I’ll leave you with that for now…
 
Have a GREAT rest of your weekend.
 
Remember to hug the ones you love (especially the moms in your life…)
 
And until next week,
 
Ryan :-)

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The Great Sea Change

The Great Sea Change diagram from Return to Real