 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Regardless of the content of your book, a thoughtful, beautifully crafted cover will play an integral role in the success of your book. Many a self-published author (and many traditionally published authors as well!) lament that, while they poured their soul into every precious word, they didn’t give enough attention to the package. Well, looks matter.
Not convinced? Think about how you make buying decisions in your local supermarket. Perhaps you’re trying a new soup or selecting wine to go with dinner. How did you choose? Odds are it was an eye-catching label that drove you to pick up certain brands. Maybe you read a couple product descriptions, and then you placed the prettiest among them in your cart.
Readers choose books in much the same way. While they usually do read book summaries to help them make a decision, how do they decide which summaries to read in the first place? You got it — the cover! Professional book cover art creates a number of advantages for your book in a crowded buying environment over plain looking covers:
- Information. Custom cover art conveys important, specific clues to the reader about the content of your book. Clues imparted by color, theme, fonts and more, all tailored to your book, will instantly help buyers determine what your book is about and if it’s a good fit for their reading habits and preferences.
- Credibility. Professional cover art immediately cues the reader — whether they’re aware of it or not — that the same care that was put into beautiful cover art was also taken in the writing of the book. It sends an instant message about quality — and you’ll want readers to perceive high quality right up front!
- Visibility. Of course, you know your book is high quality, but if no one notices it, all that pithy content won’t matter. A custom crafted cover gets a potential book buyer to slow down for a second or two, which greatly increases the odds they’ll investigate further. It’s the first and most important step to securing a sale.
- Targeting. An important function of your book cover is not just to appeal to any reader, but to appeal to the specific type of reader your content is intended to entertain or inform. For example, when creating a custom cover for a romance novel intended for young adults, a professional cover artist will take a vastly different approach than he would when creating a cover for a romance geared toward middle-age readers.
- Marketability. A book and its cover add up to more than sum of their parts. Compelling content — packaged with an appropriate, targeted and smartly tailored book cover — makes for a marketable book that stands far better odds of selling than a strong book with a weak cover.
A professional custom book cover creates an attractive self-publishing package that readers will want to put in their shopping cart. While there’s never a guarantee that your stunning new artwork will immediately lead to an explosion in book sales a poorly designed cover is all but guaranteed to get passed by time and time again. And, the best part about compelling book cover art is that you don’t need an entire team of marketing gurus to get noticed. One knowledgeable and skilled cover artist can make a huge difference in online traffic to your book — and that makes a huge difference in sales.