How-To Become an Amazingly Successful Writer (By Design)

Why Self-Published Writers Need To Understand Graphic Design, Part 1

We All Judge Books By Their Covers

As a writer — whether you blog, churn-out articles for small businesses, pen novels, etc. — you need to face facts: most readers don’t care about your words. Instead, they’re looking for reasons NOT to read them. And like glaring grammatical errors, amateurish or hard-to-read text layouts are another reason they’ll use to bail on you.

This isn’t malicious. Like you, readers have limited time, and often live by rules of thumb to avoid wasting it. We all do it.

For instance, I send every call from unknown numbers to voicemail, assuming they’re telemarketing calls, and seldom listen to the message. It’s a rule of thumb. While following this simple rule saves time, I may have missed a job offer or a call from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes. Thing is, I’ll never know.

Readers use similar shortcuts to save time. Worse is, being human and not immune to human foibles, we writers also make snap judgments based on appearance instead of substance.