How important is cover art for a book? Let me put it this way: I spend about two seconds per listing in my daily emails from Book Riot and Book Bub, deciding which books on sale I will buy that day. The book prices on both sites are excellent, usually $0.99 to $2.99, and the sales usually last a day or so—for books that are typically new-ish bestsellers and which are highly regarded. 

But at two seconds per book, how do I make sure I am buying books not only that I will read, but that I will probably enjoy?

I’m judging these books by their covers, of course, and your readers are going to do the same. 

I’m not saying you should judge a book by its presentation, but the simple fact is that people do. There is no way around it, which means your cover art needs to represent your book well.

What Book Covers Tell Us

The reason people judge books by their covers is simple: it’s the easiest way to tell what a book is about and whether we are likely to enjoy reading it. When done right, they provide the reader with tons of information. 

If you are a genre reader, you can tell at a distance of ten feet whether a particular book falls within your chosen genre.  Romance novels have a different look from science fiction novels, which in turn differ from mysteries. If you tend to read romances somewhat exclusively, you probably won’t pick up that book with the spaceship on it.

And, as an author, you wouldn’t want to trick romance readers into buying your deep-space magnum opus. That won’t work out well for anyone. The cover of your book should, therefore, communicate to prospective readers the genre and maybe the general subject matter of your book. 

And what does that default green Kindle Direct Publishing cover say about your book? That you didn’t even try, and if you didn’t try on your cover, you probably didn’t try very hard with your text, either. 

Speaking of not even trying, the professionalism of your book cover communicates to the reader something about the attention to detail of your overall product. Audiences are likely to buy books with blurry text or images, misspellings, or that otherwise look sloppy. 

If you can’t design a professional-looking cover yourself, you will need to outsource it. 

Outsourcing doesn’t mean overextending yourself financially. I am a firm believer that you should never spend more on your book than it will earn. Fortunately, finding an excellent cover artist doesn’t have to break the bank. At in-person events, I have had plenty of people pick up my first book, Five Years, hold it in their hands, and marvel at its beautiful cover, shown in the cover image of this article. I  sold a lot of books, based on that cover, and at the very least, it started conversations with would-be readers. I found the artist on Fiverr and paid her $75 to create the cover. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the results.

 If you do have a modicum of artistic skills, you can design your own book cover, which I did for my novelette, A Dog’s Thanksgiving. I knew this short, 65-page book would not have the sales to justify hiring a cover artist, so I DIY’d it. (I’ll cover how I did that in a future post.)

Won any awards? Gotten any reviews? You want to put this information on your cover. An award badge and a reviewer’s praise serve as social proof that at least someone liked your book. That gives readers a stronger incentive to buy your book. About 70% of people will trust a review from someone they don’t even know, according to OptInMonster social proof statistics. It goes without saying that you want to present those positive reviews to your prospective audience. 

You can’t put an entire review on your book’s cover, of course, but you can strategically include a strong snippet. There is no better place for it than on your cover… Front and back, if you can.

The hardest aspect of self-publishing, aside from the writing of the book itself, is getting attention for your book. You can have as many signings as you want, pay for as many Amazon ads as you can, but unless your book cover is visually appealing and communicates key aspects of your book, you will have a hard time generating sales. 

And perhaps the best thing about covers is this: you can change them. So if the cover of your book is suboptimal, it’s literally never too late to fix it, even if your title has been out for a while. 

No excuses—make sure your book has a good cover. Fix it if you need to; outsource it if you have to. And then you can get back to what you do best.

Writing.

Note: The links above to my book are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.