MSI Press Blog

  Authors are often surprised—sometimes even alarmed—when they discover that their book has more than one cover. “Is something wrong?” they ask. “Did the publisher change direction? Did the first cover fail?” The truth is far less dramatic and far more strategic. Multiple covers are not a sign of confusion. They are a sign of intent . In today’s marketplace, a cover is not just decoration. It is metadata in visual form. It tells readers—and algorithms—what kind of book this is, who it is for, and why they should stop scrolling long enough to look inside. When the visual signal is wrong, sales suffer. When it is right, sales rise. And sometimes, the best way to reach the right readers is to give the book more than one visual identity. Let’s walk through why publishers do this and why it works. Why Publishers Create Multiple Covers To reach different audiences Different readers respond to different visual cues. A single cover cannot speak fluently to every demographic. Publishers m...

Everyone wants to be extraordinary. To stand out. To be the exception. But the truth is, most of life happens in the ordinary—and that’s where transformation actually lives. We are taught to chase uniqueness as if being ordinary means being invisible. Yet ordinariness is not a flaw; it’s the foundation of humanity. It’s the shared rhythm that connects us—the morning routines, the small kindnesses, the quiet persistence that keeps the world turning. When we stop resisting our ordinariness, we begin to see its beauty. We realize that being ordinary doesn’t mean being unimportant; it means being real. Understanding and accepting our ordinariness frees us from the exhausting pursuit of comparison. It allows us to make the most of what we are and what we have. When we stop trying to be the outlier, we start noticing the richness of the middle—the steady, imperfect, deeply human space where growth actually happens. Ordinariness is not the opposite of greatness. It’s the soil from which great...

  My experience in getting to know Brazil was very much like my experience in getting to know the USA, my home country. Like the US, Brazil is large—and I was lucky to be able to work in cities in nearly all regions. That allowed me to hear a lot of regional dialects, and, like in the USA, I could understand some better than others. (My favorite dialect was that of the area around Porto Alegre; it was so lyrical and easy to emulate. But then, I have a very special place in my heart for Porto Alegre, where I worked at many different tasks.) Before going to Brazil, I decided I needed to be able to understand and use the language, so I picked up a language learning book and some tapes. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to spend dedicated time in language learning, so I had to resort to a crash course on the airplane there. Little did I realize in advance that it really would be a crash course. I took Delta Airlines from San Francisco through Los Angeles to Sao Paolo. BUT, it w...