The Scroll-Stop Problem: What Movie Posters Understand That Most Book Covers Don’t

Stop trying to reform your audience

I saw the poster for the new musical production of The Lost Boys and stopped mid-scroll.

Bold, saturated colors. High contrast. A visual that communicated exactly what it was in under a second—vampires, 80s aesthetic, dangerous fun. It grabbed attention in my Instagram feed, even as a static image. Even bracketed by frantic reels featuring pretty girls trying to sell me pretty things.

This is what book covers should be doing. This is what marketing a book should be doing.

But somehow, in author circles, there’s still resistance to this kind of bold signaling. Well, maybe not the signaling in itself. They resist change. They resist adapting to the “modern audience.”

Even among not-yet-published authors, there’s an undercurrent of contempt for any member of the public whose head isn’t turned by their artistic, abstract, and subtle cover art (and/or blurb).

Stopping the scroll, they say, is somehow beneath us.

Maybe big publishing houses can afford that posture for a while longer. They have institutional momentum, legacy placement, media connections that don’t require winning the attention war one scroll at a time.

Indies can’t.

We’re not competing with other books anymore. We’re competing with everything. Yes, that sounds overwhelming. But one thing that doesn’t help make sense of the modern bookseller’s landscape is raging against the very people you want to buy your books.

So why are so many indies doing it?

These Damn Kids and Their Screens

Novelists, both indie and trad, are in the same boat as other longform storytellers. How do you package this lengthy, complex work in an appealing way? How do you make longer content that whispers instead of shouts? Hollywood figured it out with movie trailers and movie posters. Color, music cues, quick cuts. Even for period pieces or thoughtful character-driven films, the trailers have consistently gotten better over the decades.

Now in the streaming world, Netflix lets audiences judge a show by its thumbnail and its first three minutes. Autoplay is automatically enabled unless you turn it off.

YouTube likewise taught them to evaluate a video by its thumbnail, title, and the first ten seconds. Even for hour-long deep dives. YouTubers (myself included) are not proud of ourselves as we pose for our thumbnail picture, mouth agape and eyes protruding from sockets. But we do that shit. Because that’s what gets clicks.

We are not proud

Looking at the stats, any YouTuber can see what titles perform well, what thumbnails get clicks, and what part of the video people click off.

Why won’t authors do the same?

Is it because they lack that kind of granular data? In part, yes. Amazon is extremely stingy with reader data. But honestly, that’s a poor excuse. You do have data from your own website. If you sell there, you have buyer data from that too. Not to mention social media.

So it’s not the data that stops struggling authors from making a pivot. It’s disdain for their audience.

Yes, attention spans are shorter. Hollywood is taking that into account to sell movie tickets, an increasingly unreasonable ask given the prevalence of streaming and the price of a theater ticket.

So why are you, indie author, rejecting that reality in favor of complaining about your audience?

The Work Is Yours, Not Your Audience’s

Here’s what gets lost in all the hand-wringing about “selling out”: the packaging isn’t the product.

A bold, scroll-stopping cover doesn’t mean your prose is shallow. A clear, punchy blurb doesn’t mean your themes are simple. A hook in the first chapter or prologue doesn’t mean the rest of the book is empty.

The Lost Boys musical poster isn’t dumbing down the source material with featuring a simple hand on the cover. It’s serving it. It’s saying: “If this is your vibe, come closer. Here’s what we are. No guessing required.”

This is respect for and understanding of the audience, which translates nicely into having that audience throw money at you for a chance to be a part of what you got going on.

Attention has always been scarce—we just see the competition more clearly now.

So please understand, regardless of your genre, audiences are not broken, but they do have infinite options… and finite time.

Respect the audience instead of trying to reform them, and I think you’ll find better results, and a better writing experience in general.

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It’s earlier than I planned, but if you’re an indie author needing to actively market your books, I’m opening something new in December.

Signal Builders is a community for serious professionals building sustainable author careers. This isn’t a course or a Discord server where people complain; it’s a network of authors implementing sales strategies with weekly live guidance and peer accountability. If you are interested, you can join the waitlist below (please don’t pay yet!).

December 1st is when it starts in earnest, and I’m excited. I hope you’ll join me.