No, you’re not seeing double. New photos of spines have been uploaded in this version of the ghost post from Monday. Since the blog tool changeover at PW caused this post not to be listed in the Children’s Bookshelf or PW Daily, we’re trying again. I took the opportunity to fix some formatting issues and put in much better images of the 2010 ARC spines. So — here goes.
So many booksellers and librarians weighed in on book spines in my recent post, What You Wish They Knew: A Conversation Between Authors, Publishing Folks, and Booksellers, that I realized this was a subject that deserved its own post.
While spines seem less important than front covers, they are in fact often a reader’s first visual impression of a book. (There just isn’t room for most books to be displayed face-out in bookstores and libraries.) Book designers can do a lot to help their books get noticed on a crowded shelf.  From years of staring at spines while shelving books and helping customers find them, booksellers and librarians will probably agree on a few general truisms about spines. (Take these with a grain of salt, of course; sometimes the exceptions to these rules can be striking. But usually, um, not.)
THINGS THAT MAKE BOOKSELLERS, LIBRARIANS, AND CUSTOMERS HAPPY:
Clear, easy-to-find series numbers are a must on spines. (This was the most often-requested item in the “What You Wish They Knew” post.) As one bookseller commented in that prior post: “Of course, sometimes what was intended to be a stand-alone may later end up becoming a series, but at the very least make it very clear which book came first, second, etc. when the sequel(s) pub.” Booksellers and librarians can’t express heartily enough how often readers get frustrated in their search for these numbers.
High contrast between text and background color = high readability. I know everyone learns this on day one of design school, but sometimes it may get lost in the pursuit of beauty. Which is a choice, but not necessarily a great one for book sales. High contrast and fine art can co-exist, too, of course.
Large fonts really, really stand out, and make a book so much easier to find, it’s absurd.
Keep the author, title, and series elements high on the spine — this one’s for the librarians. All library books need room for spine labels on the bottom 1-2 inches; too often, the label covers up the series number or part of the title.
High contrast between text and background color = high readability. I know everyone learns this on day one of design school, but sometimes it may get lost in the pursuit of beauty. Which is a choice, but not necessarily a great one for book sales. High contrast and fine art can co-exist, too, of course.
Large fonts really, really stand out, and make a book so much easier to find, it’s absurd.
Keep the author, title, and series elements high on the spine — this one’s for the librarians. All library books need room for spine labels on the bottom 1-2 inches; too often, the label covers up the series number or part of the title.



Consider making the spine color match the front cover. When librarians and booksellers and customers search for books, color is the first thing the eye scans for.

If a book has a bright yellow cover, we rarely remember that it has a black spine. There are exceptions to this; for example, this edition of Superfudge by Judy Blume (pictured at right) has a bright green cover and a bright orange spine, but the title is so high-contrast, and its font so large and readable, that there’s no danger of losing this title on the shelf.

On ARCs, put the release date clearly on the spine. (Preferably horizontally; ideally though not necessarily along thetop.) This is hugely helpful not only to booksellers, but to book reviewers. Children’s book publishers have become much better than adult trade publishers about doing this, but the few holdouts would really help their books by joining in. One reviewer commenting on the earlier post admitted that she actually has “resorted to tossing out ARCs with no detectable pub date because they muck up my system too much.”
Do some field testing of your own. Visit libraries and bookstores and stare at spines. Offer to help a browsing customer in a book search, and observe what you focus on while you look. Slip a mock-up of your cover in among the books on the shelf where it would actually be found. Not every spine will be at eye level; see what your spine looks like up a shelf, down two shelves, and see how that affects its readability. Forgive me if this is an obvious tip, but it’s sort of like reading your own writing aloud: by experiencing your work in a different context, you can catch things you otherwise might miss.
CAVEATS:
Watch out for fancy fonts. Titles in script, for example, are rarely readable on a spine.
Images on a spine — pictures or graphic flourishes — can be a great draw for a reader’s eye. However, if the picture is small enough that readers need to squint to see it, it’s probably more effective to spend that spine space on a larger font size for the text.
Use spine colors to help customers differentiate between different volumes of a series. As Joanne Fritz commented in the prior post: “If you print three volumes in a row of a series and use the same color cover, it’s nearly impossible for us to shelve or for customers to distinguish. As an example, check out the spines of Vols 9, 10 and 11 of Guardians of Ga’hoole by Kathryn Lasky. Sorry to single out Scholastic here, because I’m sure all the major publishers are guilty of this. Make each volume a different color than the one before or the one after.”
Metallic inks: These can be tricky. For example, while Beautiful Creatures photographs brightly, its low-contrast color combo (a subtle metallic orchid against black) can almost disappear in normal lighting. Another issue with metallic inks, librarian Maggie mentioned in the prior post, is that “recently we’ve been getting some children’s books with just the spine of the book in a ‘cloth’ material with the title imprinted in metallic ink. That is very unappealing and definitely will not last. Would love to know the reasoning behind that.” Metallic inks engraved on spines can wear off, which isn’t a problem in a bookstore, but can seriously diminish a book’s library appeal.
FURTHER THOUGHTS:
Which font orientation on the spine is best? We’ve seen great examples of all different styles: traditional left-to-right style, horizontal style, even single-letter drop-style. (This is my term for it; what do designers call it?? In searching for the answer to that question, I came across a fabulous blog by a youth services librarian with a graphic design background: JacketWhys: Children’s and YA Book Covers, which didn’t provide an answer to that question but  featured books with terrific cover and spine designs, and mentioned a font orientation I hadn’t even thought about: diagonal! (It was on an adult title, Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight. Scroll down his post for a photo.).
Everything’s relative. No two bookshelves will have exactly the same combination of titles next to one another. While you design your books individually, they ‘live’ on shelves collectively, and so some spines that work well in a lineup of one publishing house’s YA shelf might look completely different on a shelf filled with a bunch of books from other houses. The secret lies in creating a strong spine that can withstand a variety of contexts.
I took some photos of a few shelves of 2010 ARCs. Some are taken very close up, some from a few feet away (the distance a bookstore browser is likely to be). Take a look at what pops out at you, what is invisible, what is clear and what is cluttered. Notice how light affects visibility; I included two photos (last two pictured) of the Beautiful Creatures spine, the first with a flash, the second without, so you can see the difference in readability in different lights.  Notice the different font treatments and design elements; some of the most beautiful spines are the hardest to read, and some of the most utilitarian, the easiest. Some books with narrow spines have more readable titles than those on wide spines.
There are so many creative, artistic designs. Book designers, you rock.  Happy browsing, everyone.
Booksellers, librarians, readers, and book designers — what are your spinal thoughts and observations?