I think it’s generally good advice to avoid making “hater content”. It is much healthier to be for-things instead of against-things. That being said, I despise fake stickers on books.
I’m sure most people are aware of what I mean. When it looks like it has a sticker saying “international best-seller” on it but the cover actually has a permanent glossy circle designed onto it. Here: have an assortment of the sorts of utter drivel they put in these circles of sadness:
- International Best-seller
- By the author of {some other book}
- XXth Anniversary Edition / Special Release
- Now a Major Motion Picture
- {some quote about the book by some person}
A particularly tragic example was when Haruki Murakami’s anthology “First Person Singular”
was released. Waterstones – a British bookshop – released a special edition cover, except it
had a fake sticker stating Exclusively Designed for WATERSTONES: effectively ruining the
whole point of it.
If your book is so successful, why do you feel the need to tell me about it on the cover? Let the book speak for itself, or design a really nice cover so I want to buy it without knowing of the various accolades of the author.
Taking a hard-line stance
The resolution of this is that I don’t buy books which have fake stickers on them. The whole concept drives me up the wall so I simply don’t partake in it. I’ve even missed out on books I otherwise want to read.
This might seem asinine but I think it’s worth doing. I appreciate when something has had some time and care put into it, and as a person who doesn’t own a massive amount of items, I want this to be reflected in the things around me.
I don’t want to insinuate that the designers behind these books are bad at what they do. I can only assume they have little choice in the matter, and there are fake sticker books with otherwise beautiful covers, which hurts that little bit more.
Judge a book by its cover
A general philosophy I keep around is that nice packaging is a good sign, because it shows whoever was in charge cared enough to invest in it.
Even if this was done with the express purpose of getting more people to buy, at least they believed in what they made. Poor package design shows a certain carelessness: who knows where else they carried this attitude?
How much could a real sticker possibly cost?
I asked a designer who has dealt with print stuff before (note: hasn’t ordered book stickers before) and he took the guess that it’d be surprisingly high. Sticker application is still a manual process, and even a fraction-of-pennies sticker will accrue non-trivial costs over a large production run.
As far as I understand this is a major source of people getting caught by surprise in
packaging design: you start a company and think you can do a fun little thing with the
packaging, and – hopefully – you have a good designer who let’s you know it’ll cost a
shockingly high amount of money across >10K units, because a few pennies * 10,000 is a
lot of money.
The other side of this is that not selling your book so much will cost way more, but I suspect not many people hold this opinion as intensely as I do.
Being bitter vs. Being better
Perhaps I should use this as a sign to care for the details of things I have control over.
Or maybe I should just be mad at this.
I’m allowed to be mad.