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UNC-Lenovo 2018-2019 Project

Literature Review (Book Cover Design)

“A book cover design requires the creation of an appealing graphic—a mini poster—that encourage the consumer to pick up the book and look through it. The cover graphic can set a mood or hint at what the reader might experience inside its covers. After reading the book, manuscript, or summary provided by the editorial staff, the designer interprets and translates the work into visual ideas.”

-Chip Kidd, Chip Kidd Ted Talk

Genre Purpose Audience Role Rhetorical Situation
         
Book Dust Jacket Convince a publishing company to adopt your design in order to sell more books. Publishing House Editorial Intern You have approached a publishing house about redesigning a dust jacket for one of its books. While this particular book is interesting, it is not selling well. Your assignment is to come up with a new dust cover design and create a pitch to the publisher in 60 seconds on how this cover will sell more books.

Feeder 1: Blurb Selection

You are to find three (3) separate book reviews and find interesting to quotes from those reviews to place in your new dust jacket design. These should help you figure out what your “hook” is and how you will get the public to want to open the book up and start reading.

You may want to review the [Library Guide to Book Reviews] (http://guides.lib.unc.edu/bookreviews/databases)

Example:

“The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind….Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction.”–Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

Explore at least three reviews related to your book, and then identify a quote from each. Submit your quotes to complete the assignment.

Feeder 2: Close Reading

To provide the audience with a concise synopsis of the book, you are to produce a new summary of the book. Think about how you want to frame this new summary and how this will influence your cover design. You do not have much real estate on the back cover, so this should be no more than 500-words. However, this summary should give a good sense of the book and make readers want to pick it up and buy it. At the center of your book design is the way in which you want to frame the book. You want to give the audience a taste of the story/content without giving it all away. Think about how you want to summarize the book differently than what has been done before.

Example:

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love—and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.