Crowdsourcing the Cover

This part of the experience was by far our favorite. It was so exciting to walk into work every morning and be able to view hundreds of cover submissionsfrom different designers who were spread across the world. It really was a great competition.

We started by choosing 99designs.com as our crowdsourcing partner. We did this because they have a good reputation for employing designers that understand projects like book covers. We selected a bounty that we felt was a little higher than normal, we recommend this because your project will receive more attention. Then we posted the brief with a description of what we were looking for. We gave details on what the cover must include and what would be graphically pleasing to us. We also included some do not’s. One thing we learned is that a few designers just don’t read the instructions at all and some don’t take well to criticism. I am still overwhelmed by the amount of great options we received in only two weeks.

The bounty is the dollar amount you are willing to pay in order to receive the product you are crowdsourcing. It is best to make your bounty one of the most attractive because that will bring out the best quality of creatives to work on your project. In addition, you will want to guarantee your project, meaning you will pay the bounty to someone for sure, and not just run the contest and then decide not to take action.

The response we received to our crowdsourcing efforts was incredible. If you were to get a cover for a book done in traditional methods, you would pay something in the order of $5,000 and receive five to eight comps to choose from. Through crowdsourcing we spent $750 and received 330 comps. Imagine the possibilities of crowdsourcing other forms of creative designs when you are achieving metrics like that. The pricing is not the only positive. We also had a much larger choice of comps to choose from, and the whole process only took 2 weeks.