When young art student Corrie and veteran NYC cop Vella come together to investigate a spate of missing and murdered Black women, their lives are turned upside down in "Spiraling," the latest murder mystery from K. M. Simmons. To make sure the book would be a hit with readers, the cover was designed using proven user experience methods, ensuring that it meets the expectations of both the author and the audience.
My responsibilities included designing the cover and layout for a 328-page book, ensuring that the cover accurately represents the story and entices readers to pick it up, and preparing the book for both print and digital distribution.
To get a sense of the characters in the manuscript, I began by reading it closely. Since the characters were written from the perspective of Black individuals, I knew it was necessary to include a person of color on the cover. The themes of psychosis, art, and losing control informed the title "Spiraling." To minimize production costs, I aimed to keep the number of inner pages as low as possible. To finalize the cover design, I presented several options and solicited feedback through survey questions.
Printing fewer pages was more cost effective from a commercial standpoint; the text contained a total of 405 pages. To minimize the number of pages, I had to use spacing strategies; by making the text full-justify, I was able to save space and lower the page count to 328.
I produced two cover design options; I felt that the option with the face best represented the core of the book, which was Black-centric, art, and psychosis.
To validate my hypotheses, I designed a two-question survey. I had the following hypotheses:
The two proposed design were mocked up and presented in an Amazon mock screen. I asked the following two survey questions:
I was able to obtain quantitative and qualitative data from the survey findings to support my hypotheses. My cover received 39% of the votes for the poll question "Which cover grabs your attention the most" out of 79 responses. Respondents believed that the red color and the huge face stood out from a qualitative standpoint. Following these results, my client was convinced that the cover would entice readers.
