How to Design an ebook Cover that Sells
One of the most exciting and also daunting parts of launching your book is choosing a cover artist and putting together a brief. For many authors, it’s a dream come true to see a part of their world illustrated and come to life.
This is an area where it would be easy to get carried away and lose sight of strategy. Picking the wrong cover could hurt your book’s marketability.
Have you ever had the situation where you chose to go to a movie based on the trailer, but the vibe of the movie wasn’t exactly like the movie itself? That’s because cutting trailers and marketing is a separate skillset and requires a different way of looking at that story. It doesn’t matter if your cover accurately shows the beautiful space city at the heart of your story if that image is not selling to the right audience. That is why sometimes marketing will be slightly inaccurate in service of getting the book in peoples’ hands or butts in a seat.
This is very neatly illustrated by the pulp sci-fi days. Take, for instance, this early cover of Dune by Frank Herbert. It leans into the trends and pulp sensibilities of the late 60s and early 70s when the novel was originally released and gained popularity. Compare that to the currently in-print cover updated to appeal to modern readers.
These covers were developed based on a survey of current trends and what grabs the attention of readers. Not only that, they were designed to catch the attention of a certain type of reader - one most likely to enjoy the book and to read through the series.
That means before you write up a brief and find a cover artist, you need to do some research. Who are your competitors? Who do you aspire to be like? For indie authors, you should limit this research to your fellow indie authors as that is most likely where your audience is.
As part of setting up your book, you will identify categories where your book fits best, has the most visibility, and is the most competitive. From there, you can look at what kind of cover the bestselling books in that category are. This is what you should try to emulate.
These are trending books as of March 2024 in the Space Opera category. Notice how most of these are ship or atmospheric forward covers.
Galactic Empire, on the other hand, has more focus on characters, though not exclusively.
Dystopian has bold typography and more abstract covers.
Whereas Humorous has playfulness in the font and the colors.
Usually when looking at these cover pages, you have to do a little bit of editing and remove certain covers from consideration. The Dune covers don’t tell you very much about how to sell your brand-new space opera ebook, after all. Although these categories are usually dominated by indie books, there will be traditionally published titles in the mix that can occasionally dominate the categories. So pay attention to which covers you’re looking at as you do your research.
The single most important thing to keep in mind is that your cover and typography must be readable and easy to parse as a thumbnail. This is the main thing that separates a performing ebook cover from one that doesn’t sell. The vast majority of your organic readers (ie, the ones who find you by searching on Amazon versus) will be seeing your cover at a tiny size first. That means you need to get that right. If your cover looks muddy or hard to parse when it’s 100x150, it is not serving your book.
Ideally, your book should also communicate genre and subgenre at a small size as well, but it’s more important that it doesn’t look muddy or illegible. As you work with a cover artist, periodically shrink the cover down to 100x150 to see if you can still make out what you’re looking at. If you can’t, you need to work on the contrast or composition. Typography too, should be clear rather than fanciful. Many cover artists who work heavily in the genre and/or offer premades keep up-to-date on genre trends and in some ways help set them.
If your current cover doesn’t meet the ‘tropes’ of your category and is not clear at thumbnail form, it may be time for a new cover or a refresh of your current one. Trends also change fairly quickly, so if it’s been awhile between books in a series, you might want to double-check what the current landscape is like. Then you’re balancing your own brand recognition against keeping up with current trends - which can be a tricky call! If you have name recognition built up, it’s probably more important to keep things consistent. If you’re still struggling to get traction, it’s unlikely to hurt you to switch things up.
If you’re disappointed to discover that the image you wanted on your cover won’t serve it well, don’t fret! There’s always value in having supplemental marketing material for social media and advertising.
If you need more advice on how to choose a cover and work with artists, reach out to us. And check out the other services we offer that can help get your book off the ground and make the most of it.