Many indie authors hope they can skimp on their book cover to save money, time, or energy. But that’s a big mistake. A quality book cover is essential to your book’s success.
It won’t matter if your book is great on the inside. And it won’t matter if you put all of your money into flashy ads if the cover doesn’t appeal to your audience. It also won’t matter if you have a following, or authority, because a bad book cover will erode your audience’s trust. But in case you need some more convincing, we’ll go over the details so you don’t make the mistake of skimping on your book cover.
Yes, A Quality Book Cover is Essential, Not Just an Option
If you’re an indie author on a limited budget, you may try to find ways to save on the expenses involved in publishing your book. And there are many ways you can save when publishing a book, but your book cover should be something you put time, energy, and money into if you want it to be successful.
A good book cover is a huge part of your marketing strategy. If done well, it will attract your audience, build trust in you as an author and your book cover images can be used for promotional materials, along with stand-out marketing copy. Below are the reasons a quality book cover is essential, and why dedicating a fair amount of your publishing budget on it will pay off in the end.
First Impressions Count: People Do Judge a Book by its Cover
The biggest reason a quality book cover is essential to your marketing success is that first impressions count. If your book cover fails to make the right impression, your ads won’t be clicked on no matter how many you run or how much you pay for them. Also, your book won’t get picked up in stores, and will be skipped over by readers while browsing online platforms. This means no matter how good your book is on the inside, your potential audience will never know that because they won’t be reading it in the first place.
A Quality Book Cover Essential to Finding Your Audience Too!
We all know that tastes are subjective, but when it comes to book covers, it’s far less about taste (though it matters) and more about fitting genre conventions and audience expectations. This goes beyond proper layout design and quality artwork too. It means using the right style, colors and fonts to signify your genre, and therefore, speak to your audience. In other words, you may really like a certain look for your cover, and think it’s fine, but if it doesn’t fit your genre’s conventions your audience isn’t going to do any further investigation. They’ll move along.
Even if the cover art is less than award-winning level and the layout is a little off, if it fits genre conventions, it at least still has a chance.
The Cost of A Bad Book Cover
1-A quality book cover is essential for reaching your audience and therefore, to your marketing success, but what about bad book covers? Can you make up for a low quality cover by focusing your budget and time on marketing your book? Unfortunately, that’s highly unlikely. Why?
Because a bad book cover erodes trust in you and your brand. And you would be spending so much more on marketing a bad book cover with very little returns than you would on having a good book cover in the first place.
2-A bad cover will also come back to haunt you. Not only will you be putting more energy and money into your marketing efforts with little return on investment, you may end up paying twice for a book cover. Yes, after all that time and effort spent on marketing a book because you skimped on the cover, you may have to pay a true experienced professional for a redesign.
Are you seeing why a quality book cover is essential if you want a good foundation for all of your marketing efforts?
Okay, So a Quality Book Cover is Essential, But What Makes a Good Cover?
Because taste is subjective, as we mentioned above, what constitutes a good book cover may seem confusing. But it’s not about spending the most money. It’s about the elements that make up the cover.
- The layout, colors, font and style will fit the genre.
- The title and author name should stand out and be legible.
- The art should speak clearly of the theme, and should not be lazily cobbled together.
- It should send a message to the reader that this book is like other books they read and love, in other words.
Professional designers know how to do all this and fit it all together to make it work. They understand that a quality book cover is essential, as well as what “quality” means. They are able, and wiling, to create something you will be happy with while still conforming to professional standards.
TIP: You can find great ideas, inspiration and get a feel for professional standards by finding your comparable titles. If your book cover doesn’t match up, you probably have a quality issue.
And it’s not just the front cover that matters! The back cover needs to conform to professional standards too. You can read more about that here.
A Quality Book Cover Will Always Be Worth the Investment
You won’t regret investing your money and time on a quality book cover. It may seem like a good idea to focus your book marketing budget on promotions and ads instead of your book cover. You may want to rush your book cover because of your desired publication date. You may think that having a following means people will buy your book despite the cover. But there’s a high possibility of regret in these assumptions. Especially if they come at the cost of having cover so bad it is not marketable, no matter what else you do.
A quality book cover is essential in so many ways. It’s worth the investment because it is your biggest marketing tool. A good cover will reach your audience, it will increase trust in you as an author, and it will be the foundation of your marketing strategy when it comes to direct promotions.
Instead of skimping on your cover design, you can find other ways to save time and money with your book marketing efforts. Because recovering from a bad book cover can come at a much higher cost than investing in a good cover in the first place.
If you want to learn more about book covers, go to our blog and search “book covers” to find all sorts of good information and advice about the topic.
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