In this episode we’re talking about what makes a cover look professional, tips and tricks to help you level up your cover game if you’re thinking about designing your own, and some great places to look for cover designers to suit every budget so you don’t have to do your own.
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 047: Professional Book Covers on a Budget
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 47 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here as always to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.
Crystal Hunt: In this episode, we’re talking about what makes a cover look professional, tips and tricks to help you level up your cover game if you’re thinking about designing your own and some great places to look for cover designers to suit every budget so you don’t have to do your own. First though we’re going to talk just a little bit about what we’ve been up to this past week. Michele, what have you been doing?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: I’m very happy to announce to all the listeners and to you Crystal, that I finally am back translating stuff, not my number one favorite activity, as a self published author, but it’s something that I want to do so that my Italian folks can read my words. So I’m back translating the third mythological fantasy novella, Muse of Avalon, which was that lovely book that I already put on pre-order on the English side. So I’m working on that and now I really translated the first 1500 words. I am estimating that in the next couple of weeks it should be done the very first, the draft. That’s going to be on my to-do list and if I can finish that in the first half of March that will be wholesome because it will be freeing time to actually write new words for a new story. So I’ll keep you updated how it goes. Hopefully, it’s not going to take too long. I’m very excited about that by the same time I want it to be over as soon as possible.
The second thing that I’ve been working on is I’m trying to learn a bit more on Amazon and I’ve been crafting a couple of Amazon ads with very low bids. And what I call exploratory Amazon ads on the first two novellas of my mythological fantasy collection.
And this is in the Italian market and I have absolutely no idea how it’s going to go, but because the budget it’s not like huge I don’t think anything really big is going to happen. I’m just really exploring with keywords and see in the next couple of weeks, if anything crazy happens, I will let you know, but that’s just an experiment. So I’m not expecting a lot out of that.
And the other thing that I’m enjoying actually a lot doing is I’m free writing my way into what I would like to be a longer length project which is focused on one of my favorite mythological figure ever. And I’m just going to leave you with a suspense there and see how it goes.
Crystal, what kind of suspense in your project are you having there?
Crystal Hunt: Biggest suspense is what color am I going to paint my new kitchen cabinets? That’s the real question. Since we’re getting a new place. So I’ve been spending a lot of time with paint samples, but in between that we have been setting up our non-fiction books with AppSumo Marketplace. It’s a new beta program that they’re testing where folks who are involved with AppSumo and have a digital product that they want can actually sell through AppSumo it’s a little bit experimental. The folks at BookFunnel have been kind enough to work with us, to figure out how to deliver those books and make that possible.
And we’re just mashing up all of those systems and integrating our SendFox mailing lists. So all of it can work flawlessly we hope we say with anticipation and we will be seeing what happens with that over the next few weeks. So I’ll keep you all posted, but it’s an interesting opportunity to sell informational or non-fiction books to a very different market.
So we’ll see what happens with that. Really. We figured it was worth rolling the dice. And so we have. The other thing I’ve been doing in between setting up those titles and getting all the marketing materials, prepped and everything for the AppSumo stuff is to do what I call a book, business management audit.
So I’ve been going through all of my list of things to make sure I update, like in Canada, we have something called the public lending commission, which is basically a system where you get paid for books that are in the library that people are reading from the library. And you can only submit your information between, I think it’s February 15th and May 1st and each year you need to update the titles that you have in the database and then each year you get a check in the mail. So we’ll get a check. Some folks have already got them. I should give mine this week, I think, which is always exciting. And it’s a bit like buying a lottery ticket. You never know what you’re going to get, but it’s bonus money and it’s always fun to know that your books are in libraries across the country.
Another kind of Canadian option for those of you in Canada is Access Copyright, which is a company that, or an organization, that manages the database of things that can be photocopied for educational use and things like that. So if you have a book in print, you can submit your information to them and register as a partner with them and they will basically just give you some kickbacks for the photocopying that happens of your books in the name of educational curriculum and things like that. So it’s a good idea to list your book if you can, with them. There’s no reason not to, it doesn’t cost anything, it takes a few minutes to set up, but otherwise it’s the same kind of idea as the public lending commission, you just get a check once a year and you don’t have to do anything else aside from registering your books.
That is a very neat feature to be able to take advantage of. There’s also the legal deposit program. So in Canada we get our ISBNs for free, which is lovely, and yet another reason why we like living in Canada, but part of that commitment is that you will send two copies of your books in each format into the legal deposit and they put them in the national archives, so that there’s a historical record of your books. And there’s one copy that goes into circulation. So it’s actually available for people in your region to look at if they want, which is a really cool program. And I think nicer than paying for our ISBNs, even though it works out to actually cost about the same, by the time you print the books and then send them in, it’s pretty similar to buying your ISBNs from Bowker or somewhere. But I like that you get to be part of history and your book is kept in a climate controlled special library where it will last for a bazillion years, one assumes and I think it’s fun to be part of that. So we’re, we’ve been working on catching up all of that stuff for both of my publishing businesses to make sure that all of the newer books have also been submitted and everything has been added and just generally cleaning up publishing accounts and making sure that everything is in order, I’m going to spring into spring with shiny new content and some new nonfiction books as well as new fiction books and I’m on a mission to clean up all the old things in both my physical space and my business space before we move into a new home and a new office and a whole new season of publishing, I’m really excited about all of that stuff. But that’s not what you’re here to learn all about.
You’re here to learn about book covers and that is what we are talking about today. So first off, why is it so important to have a professional book cover? We have this expression, I don’t know Michele if you have an equivalent in Italian, but it’s: don’t judge a book by its cover in that you should give a book a shot, even if the cover doesn’t seem to immediately grab you.
But we all know that got to be a saying for a reason, people really do judge a book by its cover, and you need your book to look professional and you need the cover to be on point genre wise, to attract the right readers that people who are going to love your book and be an excellent fit. Your cover is one of the main determinants of how your book is going to sell, but, yeah, our budgets don’t always stretch as far as we might like. So what we’re talking about today is how can you get a great cover look totally professional, but not completely break your budget in the process.
So Michele, what do you do before you dive into commissioning a cover? What are your preparation steps?
How to commission a cover
Michele Amitrani: Before answering that, I’m going to say in Italy we do have the same saying. So it is important for us to. It’s something I think, worldwide different languages, different culture stress, the same importance. So I think when it comes to cover as one of the most important assets that we as authorpreneurs can leverage and can use for our business, it’s one of those things that our view on the subject evolves with time. It surely happened for me.
Five years ago I did not think of my cover at the covers of my book as I think of now. And the difference between the past and now is that in the past I used to think of my covers as work of art, that they should like in some ways suggest something about my book that it is done as nobody else can do.
Flash forward to 2021 when I commission a cover now there is a completely different part of my brain that lights up. Which is more cold, and if you want the more strategic. We’re going to talk exactly, and I’m going to tell you a couple of stories that hopefully they are going to inform you a bit more over this change, but for now, just keep in mind this difference, the me before thinking of my cover as a piece of art and now thinking of what basically it is, which is packaging the way you package your book so that the reader can understand if it’s for them or not.
So to answer your question crystal, when I set up to decide which kind of cover I’m going to have, there are a couple of a decision that I tend to take, especially in the last year or so, before even contacting the designer. And I changed my designer just for you guys know Three or four different times.
So that’s another thing that can change in time. But one of the consideration that I do is how can I provide to the reader, or the potential reader of my stories, the best visual experience.
This is me, Michele Amitrani now, when he’s thinking about the pre making of the color. The second thing that I tend to think about is which is the designer that is going to help me having this kind of product the more professionally, but also the cheapest without though saying that I have to save on the cover because if there is something you should spend on, if you don’t have money for anything else and you should have some money for editing too, I think the cover should be the very first thing. So these are the two considerations that I make when it comes to deciding what kind of cover my books are going to have and attached to this subject I think it’s a question that can kick start this episode, which is why really a professional cover matter?
And I’m very curious to know Crystal point on this, because I’m sure it’s going to be slightly different. She has a different view when it comes to the crafting of the cover, she has some skills that I don’t have. We are going to explore that a bit more, but when it comes to professional cover, I think we think the same that people do judge your book by your cover.
And the second thing is that you should be able to convey the message of the genre of your book in a split second. So when a person is browsing for example on Amazon, and they see your cover, which is by the way as big as my thumb. So most of the time they’re going to see this cover which is super small, you have to convey the genre, the kind of pathos or adventure, if you have a somatic fantasy, or if you have a non-fiction, you have to be able to elicit so many things in a fraction of a second, in a thumbnail size, which is very difficult if you don’t know how to do it, that’s why you need the designer.
So I think this is a good point to where to start the conversation. This is why it’s important to have a professional cover to attract the right reader and that is why for me, if you do not have the skills you should delegate somebody else who has the skills. That being said I’m curious, Crystal. I said what I believe to be the important consideration that the person, an author should do when they are approaching this element of the cover.
What do you think are some of the elements that a person who wants to give the best shot possible to their cover should consider when it comes to their lovely packaging?
Crystal Hunt: Well your need to have done you homework, I think is really important. And you need to do your homework about who you’re going to hire, but first you need to do a little bit of homework about the market you’re going to be entering.
So we’re going to do research as step one. So a good way to approach this is to go to Amazon’s top hundred of your genre, if you are exclusive to Amazon, if you are wide, you also need to look at the covers in your category, on the different wide stores and look at who’s ranking well there, and what books are selling and take note of what type of covers you like, is there a specific author or two who you feel like is a good comparable for your books? And you’re going to use those covers as a bit of a starting point to make some notes and also to help the cover designer that you’re hiring know what it is you’re looking for. And you have to get really specific with your categories saying: Oh, I’m doing contemporary romance is not specific enough. Saying it’s a mystery is not specific enough.
You need to know, is it a cozy mystery with a female protagonist with a touch of magic in it? Or is it a medical thriller, which is going to look very different than a sort of spy thriller, right? Your sub genre really dictates the direction the cover might go. And I always think it’s helpful if you can identify three to five covers that you really like, but also at least three that you don’t specifically like, or don’t want for your book and be able to say why. It’s not enough to say, I don’t like this. You need to say, I don’t like this font or the colors on this one. That’s not the sort of palette that I’m going for.
Now. There’s a fine line here because you need to let your cover designer do their job. But at the same time, the cheaper, the cover designer is, is likely related to the extent of the experience that they have and how established they are in the industry. Some of it is also about geographic location and how far a dollar goes in their region.
But you do need to assume that if somebody is doing a very affordable cover for you and, they don’t have a big portfolio of work they might need a little bit more direction rather than less. If someone is super established and they have a great portfolio of books in your genre, then you can give them a bit more free reign.
But even then, it’s helpful for you to have a couple of examples for them to start with. I think you need to really think about, is this cover of a one-off? Is it part of a series? Where does it fit in your branding and your overall marketing plan? Is it a free newsletter cookie that you’re going to give away? Or is it book one in a 10 book series that you’re going to run all your ads on for the next decade, right? So that’s going to really influence how much your budget is for your cover. It’s going to influence what the cover needs to do for you. And I think it’s really important to also know, are you planning to run ads on this particular book because different ads platforms have really specific guidelines about what you can and can’t have.
For example, if you are planning to, let’s say you have a medical thriller and you’re planning to run ads on Amazon, you need to know that you can’t have a syringe or anything that looks like drug paraphernalia on your cover, or you can’t run ads on it. You can’t have what looks like blood, actually on your cover and still run ads on it.
We’ve had books rejected for that in the past. There’s all kinds of guidelines about what you’re not allowed to have. Varying levels of steamy that’s allowed or body parts that are showing. A direction that a gun is pointed influences whether or not it’s allowed to be shown on the cover. There’s all kinds of stuff like that.
So you need to know if you are thinking down the road that this book may want to be advertised on a specific platform, you need to go and find the guidelines for that platform and review them. And then you need to communicate any restrictions to your cover designer before they get started. So make yourself a little cheat sheet that says: okay, this is book one of a series. I want to run Amazon ads and Facebook ads. These are the things that are not allowed by those platforms and then pass that cheat sheet on to your designer. That’s extremely important.
Okay. So what else do you need to have before you hire someone to design a cover for you? Michele, when you were hiring one of your most recent cover designers, what did you have to hand over to them to help facilitate that process?
Michele Amitrani: Of the cover designer that I’m using now, and I’m going to tell you which one is: It’s 100 Covers.
It’s a website that is doing some of my mythological fantasy covers. What I really like of them is that they give you a cover brief. It has a pre-made the list of questions that you have to answer. And I understand already they’re professional on that side because one of the questions that they ask is: where are you opening to compete on Amazon?
And this, I think, it’s one of the element that can get you to understand, okay, these guys know what I need. They also ask to see my Amazon author page. If I have one, if I have other works and all of these questions are designed to get for the designer, a feeling of who I am, of the books that I’ve written and overall of something that it seems like intangible, but that we call brand.
This is something that I like of the service that I’m using. This is something that is also important for you that are listening. The designer or the service that you’re working with, even by the kind of questions they’re asking you, lets you understand volumes about the way they create covers.
And this is something that I’ve been seeing. Every single time there is a new cover, even though they know me now because they’ve been doing a more than four covers for me now, they ask those questions because they want to make sure: one that I want the same feeling from each and every one of my covers, but also if I want something slightly different.
So if I have the feeling that, okay, this element has been overused in cover number two, don’t use it on cover number five. They listened to that. So I invite you to also try and see how the collaboration with your designer is framed. This is I think very important. It’s going to speak volumes on how many times do you have to course correct, how many times do you have to specify a very particular element of your book.
And I found that my collaboration has been smooth, because I had to answer so many questions at the beginning. This is something important that you should consider, if you can do a bit more extra homework at the beginning, it is going to pay dividends in the future.
Another thing that it’s important to consider for me is that every single time you sit down and you plan a cover with the designer, or you try to give him or her feedback, I think it’s important that you have to realize that in the moment we are living, exactly because we said covers are a way we package our content, we package our stories, and we let readers understand our brand, they can change in the future. And this is something that me, myself, I even now find difficult to do, but, try not to get attached to covers. Crystal and I spoke in the past about something like placeholder covers. Covers can really change and they should change if a specific element or trope in a specific genre, changes dramatically and in the business of publishing and self-publishing and writing nowadays things change faster than 20 or 30 years ago.
So don’t get too attached to that cover. That’s another thing that I’ve been learning in the past few years, so very important. It’s a way you package your product. Don’t get too attached to it. And the other, probably last thing that I will want to say on this point before you really dive in and go try and find the service that is going to provide your cover, or if you want to do your cover yourself, I think you should treat your cover as an asset not only because it’s going to be the way readers are going to experience your work for the first time, so that’s going to be the first impact, but I think you can use this asset once you have done it, not simply as a packaging of your product, but also as a promotional material.
So, in the last four books that I’ve published, I also did something called cover reveal. And this is… if you’re not familiar with the concept is basically you’re giving exclusively the chance to your newsletter or maybe a blog to see the new cover of your work before anyone else.
And it seem cheesy or it seems not really necessarily, but if it’s done well, I can assure you, you can create some buzz. And I saw it in the way people were asking me for example to see the cover before everyone else. And when I did this event sometimes which is something nice, I got people reaching out to me and say, Oh, this seems very interesting is there a possibility to have a review copy for this book?
And I was of course happy to give some of these books. So you can actually use it to create buzz on social media or newsletter. You can pimp it up a bit with the BookBrush, if you know how to use it.
With Canva, there are a bazillion different ways you can literally use your cover as public a way to display your brand and also create excitement for your next book. Now, Crystal, there is something else that I think the listeners need to be aware of which is what to think about before you hire someone to design a cover for you.
We spoke now about the pre production phase what happens after?
Crystal Hunt: Well, there are a few more things you need to decide. So once you’ve done your market research and you’ve researched your cover designers and got some options, you need to think carefully about what formats you’re going to want your book to be in.
If you’re needing an audio book cover and a print cover and an ebook cover, and maybe it’s part of a series, or you’re going to want a box set cover. Oftentimes it’s much cheaper if you get those all made at the same time. And it’s not just about cost. If your designer knows that a certain image needs to work for all of those formats, they’ll make different choices about which creative assets they pull into your covers.
And if they’ve already designed, if you say you just need an ebook cover, and then later you decide you want a full rep print cover, and then audio book cover the shape of the picture may not work as well. You may have some issues in terms of getting what you want. A professional will always be able to make something work, but at the same time, you might not get quite the next level experience that you would have got if you had been able to tell them upfront, even if you don’t know that you need those things right now, but if you might need them, you can say I’m just doing the ebook cover, but I would like the option to do a print or audio book cover in the future, just in case that influences your choices right now.
And that will just give them the heads up and let everybody be on the same page about that, which is really helpful and will be better for both your budget and the quality of your finished project. The other thing to think about when you are tackling a series cover, you need to know if you’re setting up a book or two in a series and the series it’s going to keep going you need to be aware, is your cover designer going to still be available when you need the next book in the series? How’s that going to work? You don’t want them to disappear mid stream. If you get somebody that you find on Fiverr who maybe isn’t doing this as a full-time gig, it’s just a hobby.
You don’t really know how long they’re going to be around for. So you need to just make sure that you either are working with an established company. If you’re working with an agency who has a lot of different designers that work for them, then somebody at that agency will have access to the original files for the cover that you commissioned from them, which means they’ll be able to keep going in the same style, even if that specific person is no longer at the agency.
So that can be a benefit to working with an organization as opposed to an individual. Usually, this is something not a lot of people know, is that you don’t actually own your cover design, unless you have signed a document and your designer has signed a document and you’ve bought copyright to that image, which very rarely ever happens. What you’re licensing from that designer is the right to use the cover as they’ve created it, you can’t alter it without their permission. They own the actual cover design itself. And often they have licensed the images used on it and they’ve bought the licenses to the fonts that are used on it.
You don’t own those things. So if you have a vision of just stripping out a title and, making it your own, unless you’ve prearranged the ability to purchase the source files and it probably, that also involves you licensing the image and you licensing the fonts for yourself as well, you won’t have the option to just make adjustments later.
You’ll either be tied to going back to that designer for future changes, or you will need to try to replicate what’s there with a different designer if you need to do something different down the line. And I’ve been part of all of those scenarios over the last 15 years on one side of things or another, lots of times people come to me and say, okay this is the finished cover file I have, but I can’t change anything. And, can we replicate this cover or can we do something similar so that it still feels like my book? But then you’re doing a whole new cover. So I think if you are looking long-term and you’re thinking about a series, you want to make sure again, that you’re very aware of that going into the project.
If I was designing a series of books and I was choosing which character image to put on the front cover, I would choose very differently if I knew that I needed the same main character to be on 15 books, I’d be looking for stock photos that had a model in a whole bunch of different positions with the same person that all looked similar in a series of photos.
So there’s ways that you can make that functional, but if you don’t know in advance that it’s going to be a series, that’s really tricky. And I actually have a big fat chapter on considerations for your book covers in the Strategic Series Author, so I would highly recommend if you are even just considering a series that you grabbed that book and read that chapter because it’s got checklists and questions and all kinds of stuff to prep you before you go talk to a designer and we dig deep into owning your fonts and how that trickles out to promotional materials and what to ask for and all those kinds of things.
And with our episode links, we don’t have time to dive into every single thing on this episode, but you can get most of what you need from that section of the book, for sure. Now one thing that’s highly contentious is should you do your own cover or should you hire somebody? And most authors have very strong feelings of this in one direction or another and you will hear somewhat differing opinions.
Make your own cover or hire someone else?
I think at the heart of it, most people actually do agree. But depending on the stage of your career that you’re at, the answer’s a little bit different now let’s back that up and make some sense out of it. So when you’re just getting started, if you have absolutely no budget to work with, it’s better to have a cover you made yourself and get your book out there than it is to not make any progress at all and never take a step forward. That being said, as Michele has mentioned, you can get some really professional looking pre-made covers for as low as 10 or $15. You can find some great designers on Fiverr. You can use a service like a 100 Covers and watch for their black Friday deals or get on their mailing lists to see when their specials and you can get covers, really anywhere from 50 to $150 that are even custom made for you, not even pre-made. So I think, our idea of, I can’t afford a cover is not necessarily as true as we think it is. You just haven’t known where to go to find those affordable covers necessarily, but there are options that should fit every budget.
And if you’re able to set aside a little bit each week, even if it’s only a dollar each week, you will be able to get to the point where you can hire somebody to do that. That being said, there are times when it does make sense to do your own. And usually that involves either pre-existing design skills and a passion to study like mad. Just because you are a graphic designer does not mean you will be able to design good book covers somebody who’s been working in this area for a very long time I can tell you that from personal experience, they are very different just making things look nice versus understanding the market and specifically what’s expected in different cover areas.
It is … if you are a designer or you have some good skills in that area, or if you were willing to put in literally hundreds of hours learning how to design covers, then, for me, that’s one of my hobbies. I love designing stuff. And I have spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in the last decade, learning Photoshop and playing around with stuff for days at a time to get something right or try to get closer to what is the standard in an area. It is not time efficient. It is not actually even money efficient because by the time you’re licensing images and you’re paying for fonts and you’re paying for Photoshop or Canva or Book Brush or whatever it is you’re using to build your cover with, you’ve usually paid out more than what it would’ve cost just to hire somebody to do it for you.
I think if you’re in a situation where you’re going to do a big, long series of short stories, or you’re going to do something where you really, maybe you’re not trying to make money, you’re not doing it as a business. You just want to make some stories available. Great, that’s an excellent time to play around with making your own covers and just see what you can do on your own.
You can always try to do it on your own and then hire somebody once you have your own cover and then you can let people vote if you want, you can put it out to your writer, friends and say, okay, which of these do you think indicates X, Y, Z better? There’s also the option to do a combination approach, which is what I’ve done in a few different cases.
When I knew I was going to work on something that had a whole bunch of books in a series and I wanted to be able to, do it myself and not be tied permanently to a designer you can hire a designer who’s willing to help you make a framework or a template for your series. And then you can swap out the colors, the images and the title, and use that as a consistent sort of framework for all of the books in your series to come. And that has worked really well for me in the past.
I’ve been able to hire somebody to level things up and then take it from there. And in the case that I found an image maybe that almost worked in that template, I could then go back to either anyone who’s really good at photo editing and it could be the same designer, it could be somebody different and alter those images.
So for example, I found one that was really close, but the color of the shirt was wrong. So I got. Helped to edit that. And I could just pay for a few minutes of their time because they know exactly how to do that versus me spending hundreds of hours in Photoshop, learning how to make those changes.
So there are options and you can combine those different bits and pieces to get the best possible end result in a way that does fit your budget. If you’re being a little bit clever about how you put those pieces together. Just always make sure if you’re going to work with a designer, but you want to be able to do alterations yourself or you’re hoping for the source files, you have to make sure that’s an upfront conversation, because not all designers will be willing to do that.
And you’ll have to usually have to pay more to get those template files created and they will build them in a different way. If they know that someone else is going to use those files layers and be updating things. So you really need to have that conversation up front. I think it’d be good to add maybe three things that instantly make your cover look amateurish just as a what not to do at the very end here.
One thing your fonts will give you away every time fonts are hard and to help you solve that problem, there are courses you can take about fonts and design, but there are some really great articles out there. Derek Murphy is one of the people who was often blogging about cover design in the indie world, and he has some great articles that talk about which fonts are ideal for which genres and how you can use them or not use them. And he also has a set of templates that you can purchase as a starting place for designing your own book covers. Another place you can find template packages for designing your own covers, where you’re starting with a base that a professional already made and then you’re just altering from that is at covervault.com. And you can download book cover packages from there. It’s a paid product, but it works great and you have then a huge package of options of what to start with, which gives you a little bit of a head start if you’re DIYing, the other place I would recommend you check out is Stuart Bache has a cover design course through the self publishing show, the self publishing formula, Mark Dawson’s set of courses and it’s a fantastic course that teaches you about designing covers and even has Photoshop tutorials of specifically how to do different things to get the different looks. It’s, it’s a few hundred dollars, but if you’re really serious about designing your own covers and you’re going to do a ton of them over time, then it might be a good place for you to check out and get some of that teaching in there.
So fonts and typography major issue, the quality of the images you’re using for your covers is also very much a giveaway. If you have low quality images or they’re fuzzy, or the composition of them is not fantastic then that’s going to give you a way pretty quick as an amateur who has not fully done their homework on that front.
And the third thing that’s going to give you a way is you try to do way too much with a book cover. I know sometimes people want every detail from their story represented on the cover, and that really doesn’t work, partly because people don’t know how it’s relevant yet because they haven’t yet read the book.
Maybe when they’re finished reading it, it would be interesting to look at, but that’s not helpful to get them to buy it in the first place. And it also, when you shrink them down to a thumbnail there’s way too much going on for you to be able to see anything clearly. So it’s really important to keep it relatively simple and don’t clutter things up too much when you’re doing that design. Those are the three main things that usually point out that someone has maybe tried to do it themselves and didn’t necessarily have a background in cover design. And of course, you’re going to avoid all of those mistakes because you’ve listened to this episode.
Is there anything else you want to add, Michele?
Michele Amitrani: Yeah, the other thing, I promise you a story at the beginning of the episode, I’m going to relate the story now to you, hopefully I’m going to share a mistake that I made and that I will not make again. And this was being too attached to some of my covers.
We already said, and underlined, that the covers are just the way we present our product, our book to the audience, to the readers. And what happened to me was that I got too attached to some covers, I didn’t do testing of these covers. I didn’t ask around if these covers were actually speaking of the genre the book was written in and I’m paying for this mistake to this day because I still did not manage to change the covers of some of these books, because I’m just too attached to them.
Now, this is a work that I wrote in the past, like years and years ago. And I was able to change something about it but still I see this happening a lot. People get attached to their covers and I understand why, because it’s really the first impression that we give. And it’ sometimes those covers are created by our loved ones or they are created by designer that are friends, but not all of them know the rules, that expectation, or the rules, expectation that people have on one cover. So I encourage you, if you can, to test those covers there is a great advice by Nicholas Erik saying: there is a way that you can actually get the feedback from the public before releasing this book.
He suggests doing some Facebook ads where you commission two to three different covers, run some ads on that and see which one gets more interaction? You can do this kind of thing, you can go on the forum of a, for example, if you are writing urban fantasy, populated by readers that read that kind of genre or Facebook groups. Go out and try and do some testing beforehand.
This is what I think about, the importance of not getting too attached to our covers.
And is something else that you want to add on this regard, Crystal?
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think the suggestion to test your covers is a great one. If you’re not in a position to commission multiple covers or use Facebook ads to test, you can use BookFunnel as a great testing ground for a cover. If you join a promotion in your genre and you add your book to it, and then anyone who is part of that promotion is, … or anyone who receives a link to that promotion is going to come look at a wall of book covers, and they’re going to click on the ones that they think they’re interested in and then they’re going to read the blurb and decide if they’re going to give away their email address to download or not download, because you can see the stats in the back end of your BookFunnel account about how many people looked at your download page and how many people actually downloaded, that’s going to help narrow down whether or not your cover is doing what it’s supposed to. If there were, 20,000 people who downloaded books from the BookFunnel thing, and you only got, 200 views and maybe only 10 downloads, that might be a problem, right? If you’re not getting the clicks and you’re not getting the eyeballs on your product, then you know, maybe there’s something wrong and you can participate in a couple of different promotions with different covers, especially if you’re designing them yourself it’s a good idea to test a couple and see which one does better in a promotion. You’re you’ll be giving away your book, you’ll be getting some feedback from people on whether or not they loved it and how that all works and setting up your mailing list in the process as well. All really good things to help prepare for a wider launch, but it doesn’t cost as much necessarily as running a bunch of Facebook ads or commissioning multiple covers that you’re paying for.
So that’s just a little cheat, a way around that. We’ll call it a strategy.
All right. So we hope that you enjoyed today’s show. Remember to hit that subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast and to visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com for show notes, we are linking to all the resources and tools we talked about, and we’re also going to put up links to the different cover companies, and sources that we have used before to find cover designers so that you have somewhere to start in your hunt for the perfect designer for you.
As always feel free to buy us a coffee if you find the show helpful, it helps cover our costs and keep us ads free. And until next week, happy writing everyone.
Michele Amitrani: Bye guys. See you next week.
