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 …