Although the writer themselves may have absolutely nothing to do with the creation of a book's front cover, they are an important part of it.

We enjoy checking out books because they are extremely gorgeous things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we might be speaking about is certainly different to what we might be speaking about if we were speaking about, say, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have had books we have embellished them with beautiful book cover designs that effort to mirror the appeal of what is within. This dates back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the security and replication of the scarce texts that could still be found, ornamenting each hand composed text with remarkably abundant and beautiful designs. In fact, such was the beauty held within these books that a lot of these creative book cover designs were carved into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can probably appreciate the way that the beauty of these book covers was developed to match the beauty within the book.
When you truly consider it, it is rather remarkable that a book's cover, no matter how stunning it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is practically the complete antithesis of its art form-- writing in black and white. In fact, book covers have been designed to reflect the feeling of a book and appeal to its intended audience since the dawn of big scale publishing in the Victorian Period. Artists were entrusted with finding what makes a good book cover for particular individuals, or simply put, marketing. Individuals like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely appreciate the role of marketing in designing book covers.
When we purchase a book it ends up being something extremely personal to us. It can sometimes be unusual seeing a book you love with a different book cover, merely since it is not your book. This personalisation, and certainly ownership, of books was at a totally various level at the dawning of the era of printing, with book covers being developed by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the book. They would purchase the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then take it to a binder who would add in the covers to the customer's specs. This normally indicated being clad in leather and then engraved with the name of the book, and, usually, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can most likely value the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.