Living and Dying in the Kindle Store: 15 Ebook Covers
Book designer Joel Friedlander shows what works and what doesn’t in the Kindle Store:
You see these covers in two formats, like the rest of Amazon’s displays. A page of search results will show very small thumbnails—60 x 90 pixels—that are extremely challenging to carry off as any kind of good design.
When you go to the product detail page, you’ll get a larger—300 pixels high—image which makes it a lot easier to see the covers. In some cases, I have both versions for you to look at.
This title exhibits the most common failing of ebook covers I saw in the Kindle store: complete fidelity to the print book covers. You’ll see more below, but no matter how lovely this cover is in print, it fails even at legibility in the small preview size.
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It seems like the thriller writers have the easiest time making the transition to ebooks. Here, the design is so graphic, simplified and typographically distinct that the book works at every size.
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Here’s a book that’s delightfully delicate and effective in print, but never should have just been dumped onto an ebook cover, at least if you care whether people can read it.
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Here’s an example of a great print book cover that fails as an ebook preview. In the small size the distinctive typography just about disappears into illegibility, and the most valuable real estate on the cover—the top half—is just a black rectangle. In the larger image, enough detail is restored so you can see the cover well. Works in one size, not in the other.
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Perhaps as more books move to “straight to digital” we’ll start seeing covers specifically designed for this environment. The books that seem to translate best are ones with simple shapes, typography and colors, although the ability to design these covers is not so simple.
Link to the rest at The Book Designer
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
This is an interesting article. Here are a couple more considerations: (1) don’t put anything critical in the bottom right corner since the Kindle graphic will cover it, at least on one of the Amazon screens; and (2) you will need two cover sizes, one for the book retailer’s website, and one for inside the ebook itself, before the title page. If you use the same one inside the ebook that you used for the website, you can end up with white strips on both sides of the cover. Professional covers fill the whole space.
Hollister – I learned what you describe about Amazon covers with my first ebook.
Oh, is *THAT* what’s doing it! Thanks. Now to figure out why the one with the cover then has a blank white page following it. O:/
If you have a blank page, you probably have too many hard returns somewhere. I didn’t format my own work, but I read that somewhere.
The article in this link says the embedded cover should be 600 x 800, and if you are going to pay for only one cover, buy that size.
http://www.natashafondren.com/writing/kindle-formatting/ebook-cover-design-and-optimum-size-specifications-for-amazon-kindle-bn-nook-ibookstore-and-ipad-formats
I can’t locate the info at the moment, but Amazon says different things about optimum size for their cover depending on where you look in KDP.
I don’t have any hard returns following the cover-pic, far as I recall. It’s probably some Word Oddity — there was a bug in the Kindle converter for a while that did Evil Things when working from a Word-for-the-Mac file. It doesn’t seem to be there anymore, but I’ve been carefully checking the HTML each time and uploading that.
The other issue, of course, is that a cover presumably counts as a page in the sample? I don’t know if I want to take a page of text away from the people sampling!
(I buy rights to cover/promotional art at very large sizes, add words or other manipulations, and adjust the sizing as desired. It lets me tweak for Moo cards, LiveJournal-sized icons, and I’m pondering ProjectWonderful ads on selected webcomics.)
Joel’s blog is great. I only discovered it recently, but you could lose whole days in there.
I remember reading something somewhere that e-book cover designers need to stop thinking like print book designers and start thinking more like icon designers.
I think there’s something in that. One of the main objects of an e-book cover is to get people to click on it when it appears as a tiny thumbnail.
Information that used to be essential to book covers: blurbs, author quotes, taglines, and even in some extreme cases author name or book title is now being transferred to the product page.
As such, design is moving away from intricate covers to a single striking image.
Dave
David – You’re exactly right. The last time I did a self-pub book, I designed the printed cover for Createspace first, then took it to Amazon/Nook.
Next time, I’m treating this as two different projects. The only time someone will see something that looks exactly like the front cover of the printed book is when they receive the printed book.
And I agree with your opinion of Joe’s blog – one of the best resources for indie writers on the web.
I designed my ebook cover with my cover artist, Melissa Oyler. We purposely checked my cover in both black and white and in color, and the title is VERY prominent. It’s really important to check the grayscale, because many ereaders are not color. Our first version did not “pop” in gray scale. The only critique I could see if my name is a little difficult to read as it is on the wedding invitation envelope at an angle. However, my name will be prominent on the web screen a reader buy’s it from, and there isn’t other fiction with my title.
Elizabeth – Good point about grayscale. I did check that on my first ebook.
If you view your cover in MSPowerpoint, you can convert it to grayscale.
If you’re making the cover with ppt, you can assign values to the photo when it is viewed in monochrome, such as assigning white to the title text instead of a comparable shade of gray. Works great.
TK Kenyon
I agree with everything that’s been said. But here’s the funny thing — when you shop on Amazon, unless you’re actually in the Kindle store, you’re not just looking at ebook covers. You’re looking at all book covers. And in that environment, the “physical” books aren’t any different than the ebooks. So a cover design that looks great in the bookstore doesn’t look so good online. I don’t know if that gives well-designed ebooks an advantage over paper books, but it’s something to think about.
Agreed, Tori.
[...] visually pleasing as well as accurately portray my story. That is not an easy task. After reading Living and Dying in the Kindle Store by Passive Guy I began thinking about historical fiction book covers. They are very [...]
Always so much to learn… the more I find out the more I realize I don’t know. Thanks for sharing with the rest of us!