In days gone by, book covers were easy: they were simply a coloured hardback book with gold leaf printing on the spine and front cover.
These days you have a range of materials and images that are available as book covers and not only that. Now books come in the shape of hardback, softback, paperback, ring-bound, ebooks and audiobooks so that you have to take into account not just the materials used, but the format that the book is published in!
So whether you plan on selling your book as a print book, ebook, audiobook or all three, you’re going to need a book cover to sell your book.
However when you do so there are a couple of things that you need to consider.
1. The genre of the book
When you look at a book cover, it usually gives you a clue to what the book is about, especially if it’s fiction. You wouldn’t expect a scary image on a romance novel for example, or a smoldering man on horror book. So, when you look at creating a cover for your book, think about the image/s that you’re going to use.
People
2. The fonts that you use
When I worked with a friend on her book, she had already chosen the font for her book, so when we sent the image to the person that I use, she was able to generate a beautiful image for the book. The font she chose reflected the book.
There are hundreds maybe even thousands of different fonts out there these days, and a good graphic designer will know how to make the most of the for you.
3. Who you get to do the cover
You could do the book cover yourself. It’s easy enough using Canva or even PowerPoint, however, unless you’re a graphic designer, it just isn’t going to cut the mustard. This is one area where you need to spend some money and get it professionally done.
Trust me.
People do judge a book by the cover and if it looks amateurish, then people will assume that the content is too.
There are loads of good designers on Fiverr (and so rubbish ones too, so be careful), or use websites like Reedsy, Upwork and 99Designs.com
4. The type of cover you need
As there are different types of books, so you need different types of cover. If you’ve written a novel and plan to sell it as a paperback book, an ebook and an audiobook, then you’ll need different covers for each one. This is mainly due to the size of the cover required for each product, as well as things like the spine of the book and back cover. You’ll also need different bar codes for each one.
There are many considerations to make when you’re publishing a book, and personally, I get the cover done early on, as that helps me to focus on completing the book and also helps me make people aware that the book is coming.
Don’t forget if you’d like some help getting started, then you can schedule a call with me via bit.ly/coffee-with-Karen, or message me via my Facebook page.
Either way, I’d love to hear from you.