Testing Book Covers

It turns out you can judge a book by testing its cover.

For the one year anniversary of Testing Business Ideas, I thought I’d share the many book covers we tested with readers before landing on the final design.

The final design (well sort of, it now has shiny transparent rays).

This was my first quick attempt to put something at the beginning of the keynote file when I began writing. I designed it in about 5 minutes.

Did I mention I wrote Testing Business Ideas in Keynote?

Over the course of the upcoming months, we tested many different covers by:

• Showing them to people during interviews
• Running LinkedIn polls
• Running Twitter Polls
• Placing them in talks and asking for feedback
• Recruiting customers over UserTesting.com and recording feedback
• and on.. and on… and on

As we stated early on in the book, we had three different reader personas we were targeting...

1. Corporate Innovator
2. Startup Entrepreneur
3. Solopreneur

We included them early and often in our testing and wanted to know if they could explain back to us what they thought the book was about.

And now for the first time ever, we are widely sharing the collection of covers we tested below.

Enjoy!

Kudos to all of the designers who worked so hard on the book:

• Alan Smith
• Trish Papadakos
• Chris White
• Owen Pomery

Interested in how to test your business ideas? Feel free to contact me.