David Rudes/BW

BTW

What’s Black And White And Red All Over?

By Hardy Green

You can, it turns out, judge a book by its cover. Bright red background? Blocky black-and-white type? Chances are you’ve picked up a business management book. Perhaps it all started in the wake of Good to Great, the 2001 red (and hot) best seller by management consultant Jim Collins. Its publisher, Collins (no relation), printed 3.6 million copies, and sales are so strong that a paperback version is “not in the plan at this point,” says spokesperson Larry Hughes. The latest in the crop of red books: Big Ideas to Big Results, by Michael T. Kanazawa and Robert H. Miles, published by FT Press. Vice-President Amy Neidlinger, who is handling the book’s marketing at FT Press, denies the jacket was meant to imitate any other, adding that business books increasingly are an impulse buy and that their covers must work as “three-second ads.” Says top New York graphic designer Walter Bernard: “While I think these covers show a uniform lack of design imagination, this strategy—like [that behind] all romance novel jackets—just might work.”