Post #173 June 24, 2019

“You Can and Should Judge a Book by its Cover.”

Two years ago, I upgraded my series Tales of the Quantum Corps with all new covers.  Smashwords (my ebook distributor) recommends doing this on a regular basis as a way to pump up your downloads.  To date, I’ve seen some spikes, not huge, but there has been some increased activity in downloads since I started uploading new covers.

There is an old saying: don’t judge a book by its cover.  Baloney.  We all judge books by their covers.  We have to and we should.  A good book cover captures not only the reader’s attention and interest, but when done well, captures the essence of the story itself.  A really good cover pops and can’t be ignored.  How readers respond to covers varies with each reader but there are some good practices that should be followed in designing a book cover.

Before I get into these practices, I’ll show you how the cover of one of my books has evolved.  The book is Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor, book one in my series Tales of the Quantum Corps.  Here’s the original cover…

   

It’s got the basics: the title and my name.  The image is some kind of virus particle…on a black background.  Looks ominous, befitting the story in many ways.  I liked it because it’s simple, it was easy to create, and it sort of implies something we don’t see all the time…a virus particle magnified a few hundred thousand times.  The story involves a nanoscale robot called ANAD, which is able to function at the same size scale as a virus…in fact, in the book I imply that ANAD is derived from and functions as a programmable virus.  So the image fits the story.

I upgraded the cover to the following…

The new cover is richer visually, more stimulating.  We’re still at the level of atoms and molecules (remember the story hasn’t changed) but now it looks like some kind of vortex or whirlpool has trapped all the atoms.  There’s still the title and author’s name, but now I’ve added the fact that it’s part of the Tales of the Quantum Corps, implying the existence of other stories. 

Only time will tell if the new cover stimulates even more downloads.  Or whether it’s really an improvement at all.  With that, let’s look at some good practices in book (especially ebook) cover design.

Digital Publishing 101 has a web site that offers some well-thought out tips and techniques for cover design.  In particular, the authors speak of 3 critical elements of book covers:

Background

Image

Type

 

Background:

Your cover should have a background color, texture or image rather than being plain white. Plain colors can be a bit dull so consider using a graduated color background or a background image. A good quality image will add a professional look provided it doesn’t conflict with other elements and provides strong contrast for the typographical elements.

 

Image:

Some book covers can work well without an image if the other elements work together. But a strong image can lift your cover design, give it a focus and convey something important about the book’s subject or style. As with background images, make sure this image is of high quality and consider using a stock photo library if you don’t have anything suitable. The image must work with both the background and, importantly, the type. If you need to use an amateur image, you can often improve it with smart cropping or special effects such as fading but don’t overdo these: Like the use of too many fancy fonts, it can end up looking, well, amateurish.

 

Type:

Typography is a real art and sets the best book designers apart from the rest. On covers, effective typography is perhaps the single biggest success factor. It must suit the book’s genre and, most importantly, be clear and readable at the smallest scale.

The top half of the cover is prime real estate so, as a general rule, use it for your main type area. You’re unlikely to be able to fit in much more than the title and author, with perhaps a short subtitle or series cover line visible in the larger images. Non-fiction titles might be better to drop the author to free up space for a subtitle unless the author is well-known.

Covers are the one place you can forget about working with the narrow range of e-reader- and web-friendly type styles because the cover type will only appear in an image. The sorts of fonts that work for covers are quite different from the fonts that work best for body type. For instance, readable body type is fairly open while strong headline types are tighter with less white space and, often, more height. You should only use one or two fonts on a cover and they need good size and contrast against the background and images.

There are lots of great sites for fonts on the internet. One which specializes in good quality free fonts is Font Squirrel (www.fontsquirrel.com).

 

Spend some time on your book covers.  Or engage the services of a professional.  Smashwords highly recommends using the services of a pro.  I’ve elected to do my own covers for the main reason that I know the story better than anyone.  But probably, I’d benefit from a professional approach as well.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 1.  We’ll be looking at how much research is enough for you tell your story believably.

 

See you then.

Phil B.