How a Book Cover Can Hurt Your Indie Publishing
Wednesday Writing Weekly #84
How a Book Cover Can Hurt Your Indie Publishing
What is something that catches your eye when you go to the bookstore? There are usually hundreds, if not thousands of book covers staring right back at you when you enter a bookstore or library. No matter if you like to read the first page, pick a title you like, or judge a book based on the synopsis; you cannot deny the effect the cover has on your first impression.
A great cover can sell a book and with a great book, that is an unstoppable duo. But what can a bad cover do to your book?
What Makes a Bad Cover?
Art is subjective. One person may love a cover and another hate it. But there are certain things that may make a reader shy away from your book or think it looks unprofessional.
Online I am a part of many different writing and book groups where authors share their covers as they attempt to either create their own or hire an artist to work on it. Covers with sketchy or messy designs, images that look like they are a bunch of copy and pasted images onto Canva without any cohesion, or a cover with bright, garish text and three to four different fonts are a common sign that the designer might not know what they are doing.
You may be thinking, “What does it matter? The inside of the book is what matters. You should be able to look past a bad cover!” I wish that were true. But just like a story full of errors, a bad cover can make a reader think your book has not been polished or even worse, may have been rushed.
Here are some details that might weaken the impact of your cover:
Hard to read font or text.
Sketchy or unprofessional images.
Poorly rendered art or pixelated images.
Clashing colors/ no cohesive design.
Copy-and-pasted images slapped on the page.
No focal point/ does not draw the eye.
Does not represent the story.
(Example: A sexy dark mafia story with a cute and colorful cover. That can be confusing! Unless you are going for an anonymous style cover…)
Your Book; the Product
Your book is your baby but when you start to market and attempt to sell your book, it is a product. You will want a cover that sells and shows off your work rather than dragging it down.
No matter what a reader knows about your book, the cover is usually the first thing they see. Just like your first sentence, you need the cover to capture the reader’s attention and reel them in.
A hang up I see a lot of writers come up against is that they desperately want to create their own cover but might not have the skills to do so. After writing your book yourself, I can totally understand why you would want to make your cover next, but you can always find a cover artist to bring it to life. There is no shame if you can’t create your own work!
How to Find a Cover Artist
When hiring an editor, you want an editor that has worked on novels. Each kind of writing demands a different style of writing and editing. You should think about your book cover the same way!
There are tons of amazing artists out there but when you hire a cover designer, you will want someone with a background in book cover design. This entails knowledge about graphic design. If you hire an artist to do the background art, then I would have a graphic designer work on the formatting of the cover and any text in the image next.
To give you a good idea of what a real book cover designer can do, here are some of my favorites: (note, these are artists I admire on Instagram. I have not worked with them personally!)
What Makes a Good Book Cover?
I can’t end this article without sharing a few points about what a good book cover does. Book covers are all about information. What is the cover showing the reader? What is it saying about your book?
Your book cover should have a few key points of information: the book title, subtitle, and author as needed. These must be easy to read and find!
Next, it needs to show the reader what your book is about. Books in different genres often stick to a certain style of cover depending on their niche and audiences. A romance book can be dark and seductive or bubbly and cute depending on the audience. Mysteries may show a shadowy figure or hint at the setting of the book with a street view or building shot. These covers are easily recognizable so readers will know how to find the kind of books they like.
Over the last few years, swords, flowers, skulls, or objects have dominated fantasy covers. In the early 2000s and 1990s character or creature-based paintings were popular for the same genre! Your genre is indicative of what your cover might look like. Do some research and see what your book’s genre tends to look like to learn about the market’s expectations.
Conclusion
The hardest part about writing this piece is that I can’t go ahead and give you what I would consider bad examples of book covers… I could never call out authors or artists like that!! So, to think about what may or may not be a good idea for a book cover, I want you to go to the store or library—look at your own books! —and ask yourself, “What draws me in?” See what those covers are doing right and compare them to what you want to see in your own.