Updating My Book Covers Increased My Chance of Sales
With a little bit of research and practice, making and updating your covers can pay off
Believe it or not, readers do in fact judge books by their covers.
At the beginning of my writing career, I did in fact pay CreateSpace, which is now owned by Amazon, to create my first book cover. Mainly because I didn’t know the first thing about cover design, like so many other authors.
Here is the cover CreateSpace made for me:
Now, this cover was amazing, but it made me question how I could afford to pull this off again to sell my next book.
So, I began to research cover design.
Turns out particular aspects help a book cover reach its full potential.
Market Research
Before creating your book cover, it’s important for authors to research their genre.
How well the book is doing is going to tell you what fonts, color schemes, compositions, and images readers are gravitating toward. And this is where you want to take notes and figure out how your book fits into the market. What aspects of your book will cause a reader to click the purchase button?
Doing this ahead of time is only going to strengthen your chances of book launch success.
Rule of Thirds
In art, photography, design, and composition there is a term called Rule of Thirds.
Imagine dividing the image into nine equal portions by equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines. The idea is that important aspects of your image should be placed along these lines and intersections. In doing so, you are able to create a more pleasing image for the viewer, rather than just centering the image.
Even though there isn’t much space to achieve this on a book cover, it provides you with a different perspective on how to design an image.
Design Software
Thankfully in the digital age we are currently in, it’s easier now more than ever before to create your own book covers.
Some great design software out there is:
Many of the design programs out there offer premade templates for beginners that also allow you to add elemental tweaks to make it your own.
In the beginning, my covers were enough to pass as okay, but I knew I needed to step up my game in order to actually sell my books.
Here are some of my before and after covers:
Before
After
Before
After
Before
After
So, even if you don’t succeed the first time, you always have a chance to give them an update and increase your chance of a book sale.