What's the Deal with Book Covers?
When a book isn't selling, an author searches her brain, trying to suss out what went wrong. I've rewritten my blurb
Now, I love my cover, but I've been living with it a long time and I'm attached to it. I know it's not genre-conforming; I don't even know what my genre is ~ I suppose it's some kind of mish-mash, which doesn't help in any aspect of marketing. And yes, I designed the cover myself with Canva's assistance. Six of my eleven covers consist of a woman's profile, which I prefer because each story is emotional in its own way, and a woman displaying the appropriate emotion evokes the story's mood (hopeful, wistful, sad, suspicious).
No women's fiction or contemporary fiction novel I've viewed on Amazon features a woman's profile as its cover. Strike One.
My hangup is, when it comes to the visual arts, I come down on the side of attractiveness, probably to my detriment. Strike Two.
Just for fun one day, I searched out book cover sites. The affordable ones are awful. Every cover in their portfolio sparkles. It's as if they hired a little girl, handed her a glitter stick and set her loose. Take a look here. And here. Plus, the covers are far too busy ~ there's too much going on. One wonders if the cover was designed for the author or for the employee's ego.
In my research I've learned that everything I could do wrong with my cover, I did (from the commercial aspect). Wrong colors, wrong font, font too small, overall design too bland.
Damonza is an awesome design company; I ran across it once before when I was dabbling in the dream of a professionally-designed cover. Unfortunately for me, its prices are truly only a dream. HOWEVER, it offers a couple of freebies: a PDF of current design trends in whichever genre you're interested in and a free analysis of your current cover. I swallowed my embarrassment and submitted my cover for review. Ooh, it'll be scathing!
I've also taken advantage of Miblart's free cover idea inquiry form. Miblart's pricing fits more within my affordable window, though still too high for comfort. And I would still be going with pre-fab images, which in essence means you fit your book to the cover, not the other way around.
Trying to research trends on my own through a scan of Amazon's book listings has not been helpful. First of all, the best seller list rarely changes, and if I forego looking at that and instead peruse my genre in general, the variety of covers is endless. And how do I know I'm not looking at other self-publishers' crappy covers, which I'd hardly want to emulate. I have my own crappy cover!
The bottom line, which I've belatedly come to accept, is that aesthetics be damned, my cover needs to stand out. (Hmm, you mean brown isn't the right choice?)
There are a few articles I've run across that are fairly recent (you need to find recent) which talk about book cover design trends. This is one. But I would definitely take advantage of Damonza's comprehensive guide, which also shows real books and explains why their covers work. (You know me; I need examples.)
Now that I have a couple of guidelines to work with, I can play around on Canva (again, free to play), but I'm not quite sold on changing my cover...yet.
If $10-$30 is your affordable range and your book lends itself to "sparkly", do check out those sites I mentioned at the beginning. In all fairness, they do well with certain genres; just not mine. Trust me; if I could find a good fit for thirty bucks, I'd grab it in an instant.
But at least my free guides will give me a jumping off point.
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