Mistakes Authors Make: #22 - Bad Cover Design
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million new books will be published this year. Let’s face it, it’s tough to stand out in this size of a crowd. You’re not only competing with all the new titles coming out, you’re competing with all the books that came into the marketplace in previous years.
So why would you want to handicap yourself in any way in your marketing efforts? A bad cover design is definitely a handicap to the marketability of your book. But how does one determine what is bad? What some may see as a poor cover, others will think is wonderful. It’s all so subjective.
According to our good friends Kathi Dunn and Hobie Hobart of Dunn + Associates Design, specialists in strategic book cover design, studies show that customers glance at a front book cover for 8 seconds and a back cover for 15 seconds before deciding whether to buy it. That means you have a whopping 23 seconds to really grab their eye and draw them in. Not a ton of time.
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“Customers glance at a front book cover for only 8 seconds”
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And that’s in a traditional brick and mortar bookstore. Online, it may be as little as 3 to 8 seconds.
Further, Kathi and Hobie point out that there are lots of details that can make or break a book cover, things such as:
? Emotion of color
? Power of typography
? Importance of the spine
? Technical requirements of a bar code
? Intricacies of book printer specifications
? Fine points of today’s ebook covers
Book cover design is certainly one of those areas where the proverbial “you get what you pay for” comes into play. Trying to do your book cover design yourself is, for most people, a fool’s errand. Unless you’re an outstanding graphic designer and you fully understand all the subtleties associated with the bullet points above from Kathi and Hobie you’re far better off handing this task off to the professional.
If you just don’t have the budget to hire a professional cover designer then be sure you have a solid understanding of the elements of good cover design.
We’ve all seen book covers we just don’t like. Maybe it’s because they suffer from poor aesthetics, or they’re poorly rendered. Or maybe the cover is just too busy or plain dull. Some covers misrepresent the text they introduce, unintentionally or intentionally promising a book they can’t deliver. A book cover has many jobs to do, with responsibilities to the book itself, the publisher, and the reader.
Your book cover isn’t only a picture, it’s your packaging. It should immediately communicate to your reader the kind of book it contains so it needs to fit in with the packaging that similar books use. Be sure you spend plenty of time on Amazon searching for other books in your genre. Look to see what common elements the covers have. You’d be surprised at how similar they actually are.
The front cover of your book is certainly the most important piece of your cover design. But the spine and back cover designs aren’t far behind. In a traditional bookstore the majority of books are displayed spine out rather than front cover out so you’ve got to make that spine stand out also. If you’re doing a hardcover book with a dust jacket the front and back inside flaps are also important.
Once you’ve determined what kind of image you want on your cover it is definitely worth getting a high quality image you can use. By high quality we mean a picture with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) so that you cover looks great printed. You can’t simply grab a low 72 dpi resolution image from a website and use it on your book cover. It’ll look pixelated and you won’t be happy with the end result.
There’s a big difference in the quality of amateur and professional photos and graphics so it is best to resist the urge to choose a lower quality image for sentimental reasons. There are some great stock photo websites such as StockFresh.com and iStockPhoto.com where you can find images with a creative commons license that are very inexpensive.
If you’re going to do your own images you’ll need to have experience with programs like Photoshop or Adobe InDesign. These aren’t cheap programs and can be a bit challenging to learn. So if you aren’t already a graphics designer and these tools aren’t already part of your toolbox think twice about heading down this path. If you are not an experienced designer you’re better off aiming for simple and elegant rather than going for something complicated. Covers can quickly become cluttered if you go overboard.
So what elements must you absolutely include on a book cover and what elements are nice to have but not necessarily need to have? The most important element of your cover is your book title. Shorter titles are better, anywhere from 3 to 5 words in length. Then you need a subtitle that dives deeper into the benefit(s) your reader will get from your book.
Here are some examples from Rick Frishman’s and Bret Ridgway’s previous books:
- Where’s Your Wow?: 16 Ways to Make Your Competitors Wish They Were You!
- Author 101 Bestselling Book Publicity: The Insider’s Guide to Promoting Your Book… and Yourself
- Author 101 Bestselling Book Proposals: The Insider’s Guide to Selling Your Work
- View From the Back: 101 Tips for Event Promoters Who Want to Dramatically Increase Back-of-the-Room Sales
- Networking Magic: How to Find Connections that Transform Your Life
- 50 Biggest Website Mistakes: Secrets to Getting More Traffic, Converting More Customers & Making More Sales
So your front cover will carry your book title, subtitle, and your selected graphic primarily. But it also might include if your design supports it pithy testimonial from a person who is well known in your industry and/or a seal or other designation of any award your book may have won, such as “New York Times Bestseller” or something similar.
We know how important the front cover of your book is. But in some ways your book’s spine may be even more important. The spine is the first thing people will see almost always but it is the spine that draws the potential reader in in the first place.
Consider your book’s spine and cover in tandem when you’re packaging your book. You want the two of them to be cohesive in design and image. The design of your book’s spine should be interesting and should give the prospective reader a hint as to the genre of your book. You want your spine to stand out amongst the other titles in your genre.
You want a spine that is striking. Color is important, especially for thinner books. You don’t have a lot of product “real estate,” so you need to make your spine space count. The best way to do this is by using a brighter color that will stand out from the books that may be sitting beside it on the shelf.
Think about your potential readers and how you want them to feel when glancing at your book on the shelf. Different colors means different things and this may have an impact on how your potential buyer views your book.
The contrast between the colors on your spine may be even more important than the color itself. The books that really seem to catch the eye use contrasting colors, such as a light colored font on a darker background or vice versa. You want the spine of your book to really “pop” even at a distance.
For the spine of your book use a sans serif font. These “blocky” texts seem to stand out more than thinner, serif fonts. It is generally advisable to avoid script fonts or other fonts that are difficult to read. If your book is thin than a bold, simple text is even more important. You don’t have any room such as bigger books have to put graphics on your spine, so be very careful of your text selection.
Think about how you can make your spine interesting. The design should be striking but not too overwhelming. You’re going to include your title, your name, and possibly the logo of your publisher if space permits. If you have a wider spine then definitely consider some graphics on the spine to help yours jump off the shelf.
Now let’s move on to the back cover. Obviously, the color scheme of your front, spine and back all need to combine together into one cohesive unit. But what information should you have on the back? One must be your ISBN barcode. This is what retailers scan so someone can purchase your book. You can buy blocks of ISBNs online at Bowker.com. You convert your ISBN into a barcode graphic and that graphic is placed usually in the lower right corner of your back cover.
Generally the back cover of a book will contain a brief synopsis of the benefits the reader will gain from reading your book. Usually just a paragraph or two with some quick and easy to read bullet points highlighting the major things.
Then you back might also include any or all of the following depending on how your design comes together:
? Brief bio of the author
? 2 or 3 “rave reviews” for your book
? Author photograph
? Website URL with some incentive to visit you online
Again, it depends on how your design comes together as to how much information you want to include on your back cover. You have to watch the overwhelm factor on the back cover as much as you do on the front.
It is a bit difficult to put into words what a great book cover looks like. It’s one of those “you know it when you see it” type things. But resist the urge to rush through the cover design face and just throw something together at the last minute. Your cover design can have a dramatic impact on how well your book will sell. Check out the resources at the back of this book or online at MistakesAuthorsMake.com/resources for our recommendations for book cover designers.