Advice for Book Covers

One of my alter-egos from the early 2000's: The Indie Curmudgeon, offering advice on Graphics to Indie Authors via the website Publetariat.com, hence the style...

Writers who publish books, can all benefit from learning some of the techniques and talking points in the graphic arts, as they pertain to marketing. Being conversant in these areas isn’t difficult, it just means training your eyes, for example, to see in a more decisive way, when presented with printed or screen based communications.

The vocabulary isn’t very hard to pick up on, either. Understanding what goes on when a reader looks at a book cover, advertisement or post card, for example, and knowing how to communicate your own detailed responses in the language the industry understands, will make you a more effective communicator and marketer. Even if your publisher’s art department is “handling” the whole thing for you, knowing how to “suggest” refinements or toss ideas for solid reasons will make the entire process much more effective.

Surprisingly often, over the years, “I just don’t like it” was all clients felt they owed the process. That isn’t sufficient for the creative team to understand how they’re missing the target, which direction they should be taking or how to modify the work. It extends the time involved, adds to the cost and diminishes the quality of the solution when it’s finally reached. To that end, I’m sharing condensed versions of design lessons, set up for writers. These are boiled down versions of my many years in the field with some of my own design opinion tossed into the mix. I always welcome specific questions and discussions that pertain to any of the material included in these short lessons.

Your book is a consumer product, whether printed on paper or an eBook. Its cover is its packaging. If handled properly, with a carefully defined message, it can be one of the strongest marketing tools in your arsenal. I think the term “cover art” is misleading. Art is created by artists, people whose first love is usually their art. The implications within that description can give someone a mistaken understanding of the complexity and deliberate nature the design process. An effective design is one that is created to enable a primary function. The primary function of your cover, especially now in the digital age, is to sell your book to its targeted readers.