Take a look at the books in your office or book case in another room of your home and glance at a few covers.
Notice how the book covers “speak” to you. They speak messages based on the colors, fonts. placement of images and text, and texture. Some are elegant and simple, others very plain, some outright terrible. A few years ago I participated in a an amazing group program where we all wrote a book in a very compressed timeframe, an exercise whose mission was partly to prove to ourselves that we actually could do this. I just came across 3 books gifted to me by the authors in that group and I can tell you all the covers are bad! Actually I would call at least one of them embarrassing. I decided to pull them out to read because I am interested in the subject matter but honestly I would never have paid for them, regardless of how great the content is.
Think about it and you’ll discover that you likely feel the same, which proves that we indeed, do judge a book by its cover.
As an author, we many times are baffled by how to design our cover. Regardless of your budget for the cover, you have to give the cover designer ideas to work with to develop the first few designs.Trust me, they can’t just create the perfect cover for you out of thin air!
But where to start? Here are some book cover tips as you begin.
First ask yourself: What message do I want to send to my reader? What do I want them to feel, know, or believe?
What is my ideal reader looking for? Inspiration, success, knowledge? What are the feelings you want them to have when they see your book? Just writing those down will help you determine possible images, choices of color, fonts, and layout.
Generate excitement and grab attention. The main goal of every book cover is to generate excitement. The cover is one of the best tools in your marketing arsenal. That’s why you should create something that will stop people in their tracks and evoke interest. The book cover is the hook that will help you to promote your book.
Go for Minimalism: Less is more! Minimal style is timeless. With it’s clean and uncluttered look and feel, it helps us focus on the book’s title and the author’s name.
A golden book book cover tip
After you’ve considered the 3 key areas listed above, here is another process to use. This is a golden book cover tip from one of my mentors.
Go to Amazon and look at the top selling books in your genre.
Pick 5-8 covers you like of titles that are selling well and closely examine the colors, fonts, placement of the image on the cover, style elements, etc. Look at both the front and back covers to see where the author head shot is, where endorsements are, how text is laid out, etc.
Take the best of these and start creating your cover.
The real gold in his recommendation is this:
Why would you want to totally start over (and take the risk of creating a cover that does more harm than good for your book sales) when Amazon provides you real live market research? These books are selling for a reason…and selling to buyers in your genre for a reason.
And the cover design is part of it, regardless of the celebrity status of the author.
Have tips or ideas for your book cover? Post them in the comments here.
