ECPA BOOK COVER AWARDS ANNOUNCED

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) has announced the winners of the 2010 ECPA Book Cover Award . The competition, sponsored by ECPA and Dickinson Press, recognizes the industry’s outstanding and most effective book covers that best connect the book design to their intended consumer.

The three winners were announced today at a PUBu online webinar led by Rick Hamm, the program’s judging manager and RISC Research Director, where he expounded on how each winner was chosen. A download of that webinar will soon be available on the ECPA website.

The 2010 ECPA Book Cover Award Winners in each category are:

BEST COVER: SMALL-SIZED PUBLISHER
Domesticated Jesus
Harry L. Kraus Jr. (P&R Publishing), Chris Tobias, Designer

Targeted RISC profile: Pioneers

Cover strengths: atypical imagery, edgy design, copy that challenges, evokes curiosity

BEST COVER: MID-SIZED PUBLISHER
52 Things Kids Need from a Dad
Jay K. Payleitner (Harvest House Publishers), e210 Design, Designer

Targeted RISC profile: Loyalists

Cover strengths: strong appeal in image and copy toward cultivating strong family relationships

BEST COVER: LARGE PUBLISHER
Searching for God Knows What, Revised and Updated
Donald Miller (Thomas Nelson), James Hall, Designer; Belinda Bass, Art Director

Targeted RISC profile: Individualists

Cover strengths: bold images, color and design, entertains, copy emphasizes new

The program is based on RISC consumer research that identifies four primary consumer profile groups and their buying patterns and motivations: Inclusives, Pioneers, Loyalists and Individualists. The target profiles represented by the nine finalists were evenly distributed among the four consumer groups.

ECPA President/CEO Mark Kuyper states, “We are very proud to honor this year’s winners and finalists. Each category had a large number of standout book covers, and the judging was very close. In some cases there was only a decimal point difference that distinguished a winner from a finalist. We congratulate the winners for their outstanding designs, and for intelligently connecting book design to their intended audience.”

The ECPA Book Cover Award program was launched in 2007, developed out of a 2006 study commissioned by Dickinson Press and conducted by Marshall Marketing, utilizing the RISC system to help Christian publishers develop and design more on-target products. Subsequent research was performed in 2008 and new information will be reported in early 2011.

More program information, including the 2010 finalist and winner covers are featured on the ECPA web site at www.ecpa.org/bookcoveraward.