“It’s a bit of a fool’s game, trying to predict when a category will be overpublished,” Tart said, while acknowledging that Viking “didn’t want to sit on this book” out of fear that readers would be growing weary of the subgenre. The book was fast-tracked immediately after acquisition because its category-which Tart and his colleagues call “domestic suspense”-was already, at that point in 2015, quite full. “Only after you see the title does the image come into play.” The chosen jacket worked so well, Tart feels, because it put the book’s title front and center. The early versions of the jacket “didn’t signal anything” to the reader about the book, he explained, noting that they also hid the compelling title-which both he and Dorman felt was one of the novel’s strongest selling points. “It took us a long time to get the cover right,” he said. The final version, which shows the silhouette of a woman’s face, was a revelation, according to Viking publisher Brian Tart. The jacket, which went through nearly 50 iterations, initially featured two people, since the book’s title refers to a couple. The team at Viking, where Dorman’s eponymous imprint is housed, said the novel, released in hardcover in August 2016, was helped along by the things that, in industry parlance, make up a book’s “package”-namely its title, jacket, and cover copy. Now The Couple Next Door has become a main stay on the bestseller list, having sold more than 500,000 copies across all formats.
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