Marketing: Successful eBook Covers

A great cover will sell your ebook. A great story and a well-edited book will sell a second copy, and a third, but without that terrific cover nothing will follow. It is true that ‘you can’t tell a book by its cover'. Every sensible author, publisher, self-publisher, agent, marketeer and/or designer knows this and will agonize over the design for a very long time, whatever the nature of the manuscript. The Penguins and HarperCollins of this world spend 1,500–3,000 USD (or 1,000–2,000 GBP) on a cover, because they know how true this is.

Now, self-publishers don’t need to spend that much to achieve a great result, certainly with some good bartering, negotiation and a bucket full of charm you can achieve a fantastic cover for between 100–400 USD (that's 80–250 GBP). Here are some basic pointers:

1. Know your audience. If you’re a romance writer your readers will respond to different colours, photographic effects and compositional shapes to SF or adventure/thriller writers. Check out the websites of top publisher and run your eye down their categories to see how their covers are working. For instance, have a look at Simon and Schuster (US) and Headline (UK).
2. Look at the bestsellers in your local bookshop, you’ll find authors categorized into sections on the shelves, but also crowded onto a front table with other books. Think carefully about your own reactions. What covers do you respond to? And why?
3.  Check out the top sellers online on at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, the Apple iBookstore. Which covers work when they’re tiny thumbnails?
4. Check out communities of readers, such as Goodreads. Their categories are a fantastic starting point.
5. No author writes in isolation. Books are simply one ghetto in this big landscape of info-entertainment. Look at the magazine shelves in your local store, at WHS. Look at DVD covers for the films and TV series in the same subject area as your own.
6. Authors are readers too. Look at your own bookshelves, or your Kindle or iPad and see which covers jump out at you. Try to disassociate yourself from your feelings about the book itself, and focus on the cover, the package alone.
7. When you have a strong idea about style, think further about the emphasis and order of the author name and title. The bestselling authors’ names are large and at the top. The author’s name is the brand (not the publisher, who is really a distributor or agent for the author) so you need to think about establishing your own name in the same way. Don’t be shy, you have to market yourself.
8. Think about a selling line. If you don’t have great reviews yet, find an 8 to 10 word line that encapsulates and sells your book. Think about placing this at the very top of the cover.
9. Think about the font. You don’t have to be an expert to have a view about the difference between a modern feeling san serif font or a more classic serif, or a stylish, curling script. Once you start to a designer you can let them give you suggestions based on your starting idea.
10. The image is critical. It can be an illustration, a painting or a photo. It needs to be adaptable for other marketing uses, such as email signatures, Facebook ads, indie bookshop posters. Is the image striking enough? Are the colours memorable and appropriate for your subject matter?
11. Image sources. You can surf through iStock, Shutterstock, Stock.XCHNGhttp://www.sxc.hu/ for ideas. Download costs range from free to a few dollars so it’s best to set up lightboxes as you sift through the thousands of images. Google can images is a good place to seek around for inspiration, as long as you're aware of the copyright dangers.
12. Find a sympathetic designer. There are tons of freelance designers on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. Ask your social media friends for recommendations, ask other writers and bloggers. Send a short enquiry to them and ask for samples of their work
13. Once you've settled on two or three designers, start with the first and see how it goes. Give them a brief based on your research (it doesn't have to be long, designers are famous for not reading. No disrespect intended!) then let them do their job and give you some choices. 
14. Be ruthless. Don’t agree to a design that you don’t really like, because you will have to live with the cover for a very long time, promote with it on Facebook, Amazon and all the forums and blogs that will no doubt receive your press release and interesting/informative/arresting marketing stings.

This post could have been twice as long, so I’ll return to the subject another time.

The covers at the top of this page were selected to show how different a jacket can be depending on its marketplace: the sophisticated poetry of a well known author (Seamus Heaney/Farrar Straus Giroux, US) the romantic mystery of Rachel Hore (Simon & Schuster, UK), the bestelling fantasy of George R. R. Martin (HarperCollins/Voyager UK), Amanda Quick’s paranormal romance (Penguin USA), Matthew Lewis’ gothic masterpiece (Flame Tree 451, world) and, finally, Felix Dennis’ Get Rich Quick (Ebury Press, UK).

Finally, if you'd like to see some incredible, if not bestselling, covers take a look at this selection of top 50 cover designs on the delicious Stock logos' website.

Coming soon: Exclusivity with Amazon and Using free chapters for Marketing