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PROGRAM D-7866
I’m sure you’ve heard that old cliché which says, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” The fact is people judge books by their covers all the time! I’ve written fifteen books, and every contract I’ve signed with various publishers has a clause in it which says something like this: “Publisher shall have the right to title or alter the title of the work at any time and have exclusive control of jacket art. . . .” In other words, they don’t allow me, the author, to determine what the book is titled or what the cover will look like. In fact, they go to great extents to research what the title and cover should be. Do you know why? It’s because covers sell books.
When you walk into a bookstore, you have to pick up a book and browse through it before you’ll buy it. It has been proven that the attractiveness of the cover and the title are key factors in getting you to pick up a book. Once you pick it up, hopefully you’ll take a look at the content and determine whether it is useful to you. It could have great content but you’d never know it if the cover did not attract you. Covers sell books.
That’s true for us, too. We are being judged by our covers all the time. Now, I could wish it were not that way. It would be a much nicer world if we would not judge people solely by outward appearances, because often we get wrong perceptions and that creates all kinds of problems. But we have to face that fact that on a regular basis, people are judging our book by our cover!
Would you agree that it is important for you, as a Christ-follower, to go into your everyday work world fully aware that you are often being judged by your cover, and therefore you should do everything you can to make it look good? Why? It’s not because you are trying to please people or gain their approval, and it’s certainly not because you are trying to appear to be anything that you are not. Rather, all of us need to be concerned with how we are perceived because we are ambassadors for Jesus Christ, and we want to do the best job we can to represent him favorably.
Paul wrote this in 2 Corinthians 8:21: “For we are taking pains to do what is right, not only in the eyes of the Lord but also in the eyes of man.” We also need to be concerned about how others perceive us because if their perception is wrong, it can hold us back and do damage to us.
What creates our book cover, and how can we find out how it looks to others? Let’s examine that because I think this is an extremely important topic which few of us focus on enough.