Is your book cover keeping you from achieving success? Read on for some practical tips to help.
Authors often focus on the internal quality of their book — the plot, characters, and maybe the way the book is formatted.
These are important considerations. Poor quality will lead to low sales or bad reviews. But don’t forget to think about your cover design when getting a book ready to market.
To help you get your book into the hands of more readers, here are four practical tips to help you get the right cover.
1. Study Bestselling Covers in Your Genre
Your cover must meet market standards for your genre so that it signals to readers that this book is like other books they’ve read and enjoyed. For example, your YA romance shouldn’t have a cover that is more appropriate for a military science fiction story.
The best way to make sure your cover is appropriate for your genre is to look at the top 100 books in the Amazon category you want to sell your book in. Pay attention to things like whether the books uses photographs or drawings, the types of images portrayed, the fonts used, and where the author’s name and title of the book go.
Then, compare them to your book cover. Are these elements similar? Is text in the right place?
Edit your cover or have your cover designer do so to make it match the genre better.
2. Make Sure Thumbnails are Crisp and Clear
Nothing turns readers off faster than an unreadable cover.
Sometimes, even if your cover looks good, the thumbnail that Amazon uses in ads isn’t clear. If your title isn’t readable at this smaller size, that could make you appear unprofessional to your readers.
Fair or not, readers may assume that a book with a hard-to-read cover thumbnail has lots of mistakes on the inside, too, and fail to buy. So if your thumbnail doesn’t look good, contact a cover designer for help.
3. Get Feedback on Your Book Cover from Your Readers
Before your book goes live, get feedback from your ARC team or engaged readers on your mailing list about the cover. Find out if there are any elements that are confusing, colors that are clashing, or other problems that need to be fixed.
If you have done your cover yourself and get negative feedback from readers, consider hiring a professional cover designer to help you fix these problems.
4. Order a Proof Copy of Your Book Cover
If you are publishing paperbacks or hardbacks, be sure to order a proof copy from KDP so that you can see what the hard copy of the book looks like. This can help ensure that you don’t get poor reviews from people who didn’t like the way the cover looked once they had the book in their hands.
Despite the old adage, readers DO judge books by their covers all the time. Which of the above tips helped you most with your cover woes?Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget you can reach out to Best Page Forward if you need help with your next book marketing campaign.
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