Bad Cover = Dead Book
Book marketing expert Penny Sansevieri talks about covers:
I recently had an opportunity to sit down with my friend and colleague Hobie Hobart to talk about the importance of book covers. I think some of his answers will surprise you!
How long does the average consumer spend viewing a book cover before they decide to buy or not buy the book?
Bookstore browsers spend an average of 8 seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds studying the back cover before making a buying decision where your book goes straight to the cash register, not back on the shelf.
Online bookstores such as Amazon reduce the decision time even further. In mere seconds, your cover sings or is ignored among the other small thumbnail covers in the search genre.
Mobile devices display book covers and branding down to a small image about 58 pixels square!
John Willig, president and literary agent of Literary Services Inc., told me about his agency’s “3-Second Rule” which they use in evaluating any book submission. If the cover doesn’t grab them in three seconds they pass on it. Only three seconds!
. . . .
What distinguishes a bestselling, brand-building book from one that practically guarantees your book will never sell?
Though there are many answers to this question, the most important would be that the cover must absolutely make a connection between your book and your chosen target market. The colors, typestyles and images (if you are using some) must be compatible with the preferences of that market to elicit an immediate response that says, “Pick me!” The title and subtitle have to be concise and compelling. The clear visual reference to a series or previous bestseller, the format of the book (hardcover, softcover, large, small), the look of the inside page design, the width of the spine, the weight and feel of the cover stock … all of these and more need to be right to garner bestselling status and build a brand, and to avoid a garage full of dusty unsold books.
Link to the rest at Author Marketing Experts
Passive Guy will add that indie authors can always change the covers of their books. You want to make sure you aren’t deceiving prospective purchasers into thinking this is not the same book they may have purchased before (although they can always return it, ebook or not, to Amazon), but there are no rules saying you can’t fix a bad decision.
As mentioned before, Mrs. PG is reissuing her backlist and PG would do new covers even if she had rights to the old ones.
In an article extolling professional design of book covers and discussing the necessity for it in order to gain sales, every single one chosen as an example would positively repel me.
I’m a science fiction reader, and I’ve been looking at generic, misleading, or irrelevant book covers for so long that covers play little or no part in my buying decision. I suppose it’s possible that there’s a subliminal effect I’m not aware of, but as far as conscious effort is concerned the cover is something to flip aside so as to read an excerpt.
Contradictory? Perhaps. Of course, none of the covers depicted go on SF. I guess I’m saying a cover can push me away, but is unlikely to attract me.
Regards,
Ric
You’re absolutely right, Mr. Locke. Every genre writer, but particularly sf writers, has a row of his or her own books on the shelf, all of which have absolutely horrendous covers, all of which were done by professional artists and designers, who got paid for doing them. Same thing is happening with ebooks now — I see ebooks all the time for which indie writers have paid somebody to do a cover, and an awful lot of ‘em just suck. You might as well do your own and be happy with them.
I don’t know. The fact is that professionally done covers tend to have a certain polish that few DIY covers have. I have a mix of professionally done and DIY (by my co-author). While I don’t think the DIY ones are terrible or kill sales, in fact I’ve received a few compliments on them, they just don’t look quite professional, and I think this may influence whether potential readers look further or not.
I’d pick up the Snow White book to get a better look at that cover, but yeah, those covers displayed all scream that I’m not the target audience for ‘em.
Certain cover-styles do attract me — the artist who did the covers for Lackey’s Valdemar series, for instance, also did a cover for a different series and every single time I saw that other series, I’d pick it up, read the back cover, and put it down again ’cause it didn’t seem to be what I wanted. And then there’s Michael Whelan.
Yeah, I’ll pick up any book with a Michael Whelan cover. Part of that is knowing what the publisher likely had to pay for it — if they think the book warrants that kind of investment, it might be worth reading. (The same was true of a Frazetta cover, back in the day, and a Kelly Freas cover implied a certain kind of story.)
But it’s by no means an automatic buy.
Were the covers shown in the linked page supposed to be good examples or bad examples? They looked like bad examples from the early 60s to me.
Well, I do know. I’ve had professionally done covers foisted on me by print publishers, which have killed sales. My readers have told me as much, that they didn’t purchase certain editions of my books because they would have been embarrassed carrying them up to the cash register.
Frankly, I take it with a pretty large grain of salt when a professional cover designer tells me that I have to engage the services of a professional cover designer, otherwise I’m committing commercial suicide. Not exactly a disinterested party, is he? Most of the stuff that Hobie Hobart, the designer quoted in the article, does is for non-fiction titles, but here’s the fantasy genre cover that he provides as a “great” example on his website:
http://www.dunn-design.com/support/books/silverlance.gif
Do you think that’s a good cover? I don’t; I think it’s formulaic junk. Could I do better? Yes; I have already. And frankly, so could you or just about any other writer.
OMG! That cover is horrid. I’m not sure that ANY writer could do better. You don’t know how pathetic my graphics skills are.
@DDW the worst cover I ever had, and I mean by far, was from a publishing company and it was contracted from an artist they chose. Admittedly it was a small publishing company but the cover was so bad I was embarrassed to promote the novel. If publishing companies can’t recognize terrible covers, I’m not sure you can necessarily expect writers to do so.
Well, as my pals and e-publishing gurus Mike Stackpole and Dean Wesley Smith would probably say, you mastered a lot more difficult skills in order to write your books; doing an effective cover design is within your powers as well.
I’m not saying that you’ll necessarily be able to do it at the graphics design level of a master like Saul Bass, but to do a cover design that’s good enough, in the sense of at least not turning potential readers off to the book, and that is certainly better than some of the crap that these supposedly professional designers are foisting off on their cients — yeah, you can do that.
I actually was intrigued by the cover! Not by the quality of the art, and the font is unforgivably unreadable, but my thoughts went, roughly, “there is a centaur on the cover, and a faun; perhaps they are the main characters?” And I’m a sucker for non-human viewpoints. I’ve downloaded a sample! So as a cover… it did its job.
I thought the font for the Silverlance cover was a poor choice, unreadable until I enlarged the picture, and no humans in picture, unless the two floating heads at the back were human. I got that it was fantasy, but not an attractive cover to me.
A cover’s main job should be to get members of the target audience to read the blurb. But it is never a good thing if the potential buyer is embarrassed to be seen with it.
Genre writers (and readers) have long suffered through astonishingly inappropriate and/or formulaic covers that play into some rather sad stereotypes, but even the worst of them generally display a level of typographical and design skill in the arrangement of elements that is a well above the worst of the indie covers.
Both DIY and paid indie covers vary in appearance from professional quality to looking like something a visually impaired toddler did in MS Paint. It’s one thing to have no artistic or design skills and be unable to personally make an acceptable cover on your own. The apparent inability of many indie writers to recognize an atrociously bad cover and realize they need to try again or get help is what stuns me. Perhaps there’s a visual equivalent to tone deafness.
This was meant to come as a reply to JR and my internet exploded. It seems to have ended up here when I tried to resubmit it. Oh well…
Small presses can suffer from the same problem as an individual working on their own, as that may very well be the case, or very nearly so, at a small press.
My instinct is to agree that everyone should be able to put together a cover that’s good enough. (I won’t name them, but there is at least one BIG selling indie writer who’s covers are pretty amateurish in my opinion). If you don’t have artistic skills or money to pay an artist, start with a photo or illustration from one of the cheap stock photo sites. I think the typography might be the most difficult part for a lot of people. The signs that mark poor typographical choices can be subtle and hard to put your finger on, but there is no shortage of typography books, so if the writer grabs a few from the library and plays which of these things is not like the other for a while with their own cover and some professionally done covers they like, I think most anyone can start to develop a feel for it.
Either way, you have to have the judgement to decide whether it’s a terrible cover or not. That’s not always easy for some of us anyway. I do think a DIY cover can be adequate and I’ve seen a few that were quite impressive.
I believe there is a difference between what a fiction cover does for a pbook or ebook, and I thought most of the covers in the article link were very bad, (although I suspect they were all non fiction).
A fiction pbook cover needs to attract the reader to pick up the physical book from the already organised genre type shelves and read the blurb and hopefully purchase. Remember most are spine out, so you can not see the cover until you remove the book from the shelf. (So, right there, it is the author name and title that attracts the reader, not the graphic.)
The pbook lists on Amazon show the graphic, so should be treated like an ebook. First the reader must read the blurb, and the sample, if available, before purchasing.
An ebook cover (already genre sorted) needs to draw the reader’s eye to the blurb and if it is the reader’s type of story then the reader downloads the free sample to read later, and moves down the list of displayed covers. It is only after reading the sample that the reader decides to purchase the rest of the book or not.
I believe that a list of dark indistinguishable graphics and unreadable fonts will only be used to make the pale yellow, green or pink ebook cover with large clean readable fonts stand out, and draw the reader’s attention and win a chance to download the sample.
I will wait and watch to see the slow change of thought on what ebook covers actually do to attract a reader as the industry grows and settles, and readers learn to read the meta data displayed beside the cover and blurb.
I found The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams really helpful as a starting place. She explains typography in a way that people like me, with no graphic design background, can easily understand. I noticed while looking for books on the subject that many of them have very little explanatory text. Williams’ book has enough that you’re not left attempting to decipher the illustrations like an Egyptologist trying to read hieroglyphics without the Rosetta stone.
One thing that pundits fail to consider, though is that browsing is much less important with ebooks, especially with niche books — which is where a lot of indie and small press books are.
Yes, covers are an important sales tool, but not nearly as important as they were when books were “perishable” products which had to sell hot in a short window of time.
But at least for the “long tail” end of indie books, word of mouth and author branding will be more important. Sure the covers shouldn’t turn people off, but the cover will just be the “product image” and not mean as much once the audience has made the full shift to ebooks.
“John Willig, president and literary agent of Literary Services Inc., told me about his agency’s “3-Second Rule” which they use in evaluating any book submission. If the cover doesn’t grab them in three seconds they pass on it.”
Agents normally tell us to avoid sending covers as this is the job of the professionals who know best.
I suspect the author did not speak personally to Mr. Willig, or it would have been explained to him that by “cover” Willig meant cover LETTER.