As I move closer to needing to actually sell this novel I’ve written, I have to start thinking seriously about what matters most for doing that — if, for no other reason, than to know where to direct most of the budget I’m willing to potentially waste on getting this thing out into the world of Amazon.
There are plenty of factors that go into that. I talked about three of those in another post. The top one I cited was the book’s cover. Honestly, if your book cover is terrible, I’m not sure much else matters. You can write the next Great American Novel, but if your cover is done by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but once dabbled with Photoshop a few years ago. If your cover looks like it was done in MS Paint, nobody’s ever gonna know if your book is any good.
Why’s that? One of the biggest changes with everyone buying eBooks now is everyone sees your cover first. When people bought most of their books in physical stores, they tended to see the spine. The title and design of that side of the book mattered a lot. Now, the spine barely matters to most; the title still has a good bit of impact, but the cover is the big thing. It needs to be eye catching, but still fit into the niches that are established in your genre. It needs to be unique, but not too unique. It needs to stand out in a crowd, but still be targeted to a specific audience. It’s hard to get right, and pretty easy to get really wrong.
The good news with that is there’s no reason you can’t have a re-do on the cover. If you eventually don’t like your cover, you can always get a new one and have an excuse to do a relaunch. And if you cheap out on your cover, there’s a decent chance that’s exactly what you’ll do. It’s worth putting the investment in from the beginning to get it right from the start.
I’ll be diving into getting my cover set up for my novel soon. I’ll be honing in on dystopian covers, so I’m looking for dark colors (reds, blacks), cliffs, distressed urban settings, etc. That’s what readers expect to see, and that’s what they tend to respond to. I’ll be hiring a cover designer that can deliver that, who has experience designing eBook covers, along with paperback ones that sell. Hopefully, I can find the right fit for that. It’s one more step toward putting this book in all of your grubby little hands.
Leave a Reply