Book cover designers have one of the trickiest jobs in the industry. They have to create covers that attract the largest possible number of potential customers. This is especially important when the book has no thrilling title to help make it pop. So what’s important when choosing a book cover?

One creator of a woodland creature-themed baby guest book recently took five cover designs to PickFu and created a poll to find out which one stood out above the rest. The creator asked 50 women to rank their favorite options:

A book description often decides whether someone buys a book or puts it back on the shelf. This means that it’s crucial for authors to test their book descriptions, which is easy to do using PickFu.

Recently, one author split-tested two book descriptions by asking respondents, “Which book description sounds more appealing?”

Option A switches uneasily between tenses and sounds somewhat distant, but it’s short and easy for the eye to digest.

Option B begins with a more urgent first line, but it’s longer.

Can you guess which one won?

Say you’re a writer of religious self-help books, but you want your book to appeal to everyone. Do you design your title and cover with religion in mind or the general audience who’ll be reading it (hopefully)?

Author Michael Peters created a PickFu poll to answer that question for his own religious self-help book.

Option A’s title is a bit of a mouthful: Lost in Detroit: Bent Nails, Alien Life, and Jesus of Nazareth: The Journey to the Non-Religious Jesus. The cover features a clean black, white, and turquoise color scheme with the Detroit skyline below the title.

Option B’s title is much shorter: Tired of Religion? Come & See Jesus of Nazareth. The cover art is a blurred painting of Jesus.

Can you guess which one won?

There’s something appealing about reading a book from an insider’s perspective. It could be a book about being a paparazzo, or a midwife, or a maid. If there’s the magnetic pull of secret, insider information, we want to know it.

But there are ways to make even the most intriguing insider books stand out. One airline pilot wrote a book about tackling jetlag — from a pilot’s perspective — and created a PickFu poll to test two covers and titles.

Option A features a yellow-and-black illustration of a flight information display system. Option B shows two passports and an airplane laid over a map. The subtitle is long but neatly tucked under the prominent title.

Can you guess which one won?

While PickFu is incredibly useful for ebook authors, it’s also a vital testing tool for authors who plan to publish their books in print. One author recently tested four print book cover design options for a book about Canadian facts and trivia. She specifically asked poll respondents which cover they’d pick up in a store.

Option A crowds its cover with chunky illustrations and playful font.
Option B has a cleaner look, with the subtitle set in a circle surrounded by Canadian landmarks.
Option C is similar to Option B but with a different color scheme and illustration.
Option D neatly lays out the Canadian landmarks illustration on the bottom half of the page.

Can you guess which one won?

Are you a risk-taker, or do you usually stay away from, say, the edges of cliffs? Do you consider yourself a bold person, someone who radiates confidence? And finally, do you have to live dangerously in order to be bold?

One author set out to answer these questions when she created a PickFu poll to choose a cover for her book Live a Bold Life: Your 30 Day Mission to a Fearless Future.

Option A’s mustard-yellow cover doesn’t feature any danger-evoking images, but the word bold stands out from the rest of the title. In stark contrast, Option B features an illustration of a person standing at the edge of a cliff.

Can you guess which one won?

Most business owners are interested in books about marketing. But what if you wrote a book about account-based marketing (ABM) — a strategy in which the standard funnel gets flipped on its head — and wanted it to catch a reader’s attention? You’d need to demonstrate the upside-down nature of ABM through creative book cover design ideas.

One pair of authors tested two different cover designs for their book, ABM is B2B. Why Traditional Marketing is Broken and How to Fix It in a recent PickFu poll.

Option A’s bright yellow cover features a broken heart behind the subtitle. Option B features a soft blue cover with an egg cracked in the middle of it.

Can you guess which one won?

If you write an e-book, you might assume you can get away with spending less time on your book cover than someone who’s publishing a physical book.

But e-book covers matter just as much as physical book covers. When potential customers browse an online selection, the cover is the first thing they see. For some books, covers are especially important because they reflect what the book is selling.

Take this recent PickFu poll, run by the author of a DIY interior design e-book aimed at women. The pollster created a ranked poll on PickFu to find out which of their covers attracted the audience best.

Option A features a book cover with a tidy text box against a clean, modern-looking room. You can’t see a whole lot of the home because the focus is on the tables, but the title and subtitle look professional.

Option B removes the box and shifts the title upward, helping potential readers to see more of the room.

Option C introduces new font colors and shifts a banner of text over the fireplace.

Can you guess which one won?