It’s bold, autumnal, and adorns team uniforms, frozen desserts, and hair. Wherever orange is used, it makes a statement.  With changing leaves and Halloween approaching, it’s appropriate to call attention to fall colors and covers.

For this post, I rounded up all of the orange SAS book titles that I could find (conveniently located in the library across the hall from my office). With a little persuasion, SAS Press acquisitions editor and cover marketing specialist Stacey Hamilton agreed to answer a few questions about what exactly goes into selecting a book cover’s color.

Shelly Goodin (SG): How do you select colors for book covers?

Stacey Hamilton (SH): We ask authors for their input. We ask, What colors do you hate? What colors do you love? What are the colors of your favorite football team? We also look at recent titles. Have we had eight purple covers in the last six months? Are we stuck in a rut of red, red, and more red?

(SG): Is there a most commonly used color on SAS Press books? A least common color or never used color?

(SH): We try to vary the cover colors so that our books look different and interesting on the shelf at conferences. I can’t say there is a color we use most often, but we do tend to have a lot of purples and reds. The purple is my fault. I’m quite fond of the color. We stay away from pink (not many people want to see a pink programming book, for some reason) and white (and all-white cover doesn’t show up well on the Web).

(SG): Where does orange rate?

(SH): Orange rates highly, at least with me (as a proud alum of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Go Big Orange!)

(SG): What do you most enjoy about working with design?

(SH): That we get to work with such a creative and talented team of designers here at SAS on our book covers. I’m not a designer and have never pretended to be!

You can’t search by color in our catalog, but you can learn more about all of the spicy titles in this post’s featured photo. Do you have a favorite SAS book cover?