‘Eat Pray Love’ author Elizabeth Gilbert crowdsources next book cover

Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love can have their say about what the cover of her next book will look like.

Gilbert used her Facebook fan page to post three potential covers for her forthcoming novel, The Signature of All Things, and she is asking readers to use an app to vote for their favourite.

She posted a message explaining the contest on Wednesday:

“My brave American publisher (Viking) and I are about to attempt something that, to the best of my knowledge, has never before been done in the publishing world. We are asking you, the readers, through a Facebook app, to make the final decision about which one of these three options should be the final cover for the American publication of “The Signature of All Things.”

Here are the options:

While Gilbert is promoting this cover contest as something that “has never been done before in the publishing world,” her publisher is hardly the first to use social media to promote an upcoming book launch.

Dan Brown’s publisher, Doubleday, also used social media to build buzz in the lead up to his latest novel Inferno, which will be released in the U.S. on May 14. Brown fans were asked to tweet #DanBrownTODAY or click the “Add Me” button on Facebook and the name of the novel was supposed to be released in a mosaic on the Today Show website. Readers responded so much that they crashed the site and received error messages, rather than the book title. The name Inferno was still released on the Today Show, as cheering Dan Brown fans watched.

The Signature of All Things, is due out in the U.S. on Oct. 1. The design for the British cover has already been released.