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The Story Behind Primal Branding’s Scary Book Cover
A friend once told me that my book Primal Branding was successful despite the first black and white cover. On the other hand, I knew of people who bought the book specifically because of its impactful cover.
“Primal Branding”’s original scary book cover, first published in 2006, has always been controversial. First of all, what is that image? An alien? A mask? More to wonder.
Fred Hills, my editor at Simon & Schuster, liked it. My literary agent, Jonathan Lazear, did not. The publisher at Free Press liked it, and as I remember, so did the sales guys. Others did not.
I designed the book cover myself. But not intentionally. What happened was, while the book was being prepared for publishing, I gave talks at Presidents Clubs, CEO Circles and other events to upgrade my speaking skills. Several times, people mentioned that I needed something (a handout) that listed the seven pieces of Primal Code®. It was just too much for people to remember.
So I designed a 4 by 6-inch postcard to hand out. This was probably in 2004 and there was no place on the internet (yet) to search for stock photos. You had to rummage through…
