Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
130
 www.ideavirus.com
example, has wisely let the parody virus spread unfettered. Being parodied online is a
shortcut to burning the Budweiser brand further into our subconscious.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
131
 www.ideavirus.com
Judging a book by its cover
No question, a great cover can make or break your book. Kurt Andersen wrote one of the
funniest books I’ve ever read (
Turn of the Century
) but, by all accounts, it didn’t meet sales
expectations. Why? One reason is the cover, which is one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my
life.
Remember, the search for Medusa is usually a hopeless quest. But just as it’s difficult to sell
someone on your ideavirus with just an image, it’s also nearly impossible to suck them
further in if the image is offputting, inconsistent or boring.
Boring is probably the worst offense. Whether your product is a book, a trading card, a car
or even the tag on a bag of tea, boring is the obvious, but wrong, solution.
You’ve worked very hard on the stuff “inside.” You’ve refined, tested, edited and slaved to
make sure that the idea is powerful indeed. And then it comes time to make the
package—the cover. The prevailing wisdom is to create a cover that’s attractive but not
offensive. Something that will attract attention from everyone and offend no one.
This is nonsense, of course. It can’t possibly attract everyone and offend no one. The very
best cover images are like a cold glass of water thrown in your face. They break one or more
rules of graphic design or industry rules of thumb. They play off existing images but change
them in a vital and important way. They’re loud. They attract the eye, but they also hold it.
And most of all, they intrigue us enough that we need to understand what’s inside: we set
ourselves up to be exposed to the virus.
When Yahoo! first launched, the company name and logo broke every rule in the book. But
co-founder Jerry Yang will be the first to tell you that in a world populated with Lycos,
AltaVista, InfoSeek and Architext/Excite, Yahoo! was the easy winner. Easy to spell. Easy to
type. Easy to tell other people about.
And it had personality. It meant something.

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