When you walk into a bookstore, you’ll notice one thing before anything else.
They display as many books as possible with the cover facing you.
This is because the cover forms your first impression of a book and is often what makes you decide to buy it.
Book Covers set all of the expectations
Book covers serve many purposes, but one purpose trumps all of the others.
The cover sets your expectations for the rest of the book.
Here’s how it usually goes:
- You pick up a book with an attractive cover.
- Then you read the description on the back.
- Then you look at the cover again.
- You stand there thoughtfully, looking at the cover and thinking about the description.
- You buy it or put it back.
If you’re a bookaholic like me, this ritualistic dance has happened hundreds of times on Amazon and in brick-and-mortar stores. We like it; we love it; we can’t get enough of it.
And millions of shoppers, just like us, will do the same with your book before they buy it.
A professional book cover is a smart investment
By buying a book, people are investing time and money. And when it comes to time and money, nobody takes the decision lightly. If they think the cover looks cheap or hastily thrown together, they assume that the content is also of poor quality.
If the cover—the first thing every potential customer sees—is unattractive, then they conclude that the content won’t be captivating or that it will be riddled with spelling and grammar errors.
Investing in a good cover is, in essence, investing in the success of your book. Your biggest investment was the time you spent writing it. Now, it’s time to spend money. If you want your book to sell, you need a professional cover design.
How cover design = sales (or why books are like apples)
When it comes to selling your book, your cover design is more important than anything else. It is more important than:
- The content of the book
- Advertising campaigns
- The book description
- The interior layout
If you have a poor cover design, that book you poured your heart and soul into won’t sell any better than the bruised at the grocery store.
The book industry is huge, and there are millions of authors publishing books every day.
Whether you like it or not, your book will be displayed next to other books. Going back to the apples—nobody is going to buy a bruised, discolored apple when it is sitting right next to an array of bright red, unmarred, delicious-looking apples.
Just like at the bookstore, the first thing you do with fruit is to look at it. Only then do you pick it up, look for imperfections, and then decide if you’re buying it.
And just like it is with books, it’s only once you’ve made the purchase that you know if it was worth buying. And if you got a bad apple, it wasn’t because it didn’t look perfect.
So, what makes a cover pop? What makes it so eye-catching that anyone looking at it will at least think of taking the next step and reading the back description?
Book design: the fundamentals
A brilliant cover, like everything else, is created by adhering to a set of fundamentals. An experienced, skillful cover designer knows all of them, and won’t ever be satisfied until you are 100% thrilled.
A professional cover designer knows the balance between too cluttered and too plain.
They know the difference between plain and over-extravagant.
They balance elegance with simplicity, aggressive with gentle, and will always make the right choices for color, image, and font.
Letters won’t be misaligned. The images won’t be off-kilter with the text or other images. There won’t be any obvious Photoshop inserts or color schemes that lack synergy.
You can also count on a professional cover designer to never make the biggest mistake of all:
Misrepresenting your book.
What’s worse than buying a bad book?
Buying the wrong book.
Nobody wants to come home with what they think is a high fantasy epic only to get ten pages in and realize they spent their money on a post-apocalyptic Wild West mystery yarn.
It is very important that the cover accurately represents the message or story of your book, whether it is fiction or nonfiction.
It’s not worth the money or results to give your book to a publishing mill that’s only concerned about speediness and profits.
The only cover designer you should ever hire should not only be professional, but one that pays personal attention to you, what you want, and what your book is about.
The JETLAUNCH way
That is what we do here at JETLAUNCH. Our professional designers are not happy until you are. Completely. In addition to an amazing eye-catching cover, you also get:
- 100% approval rights (we keep going until you’re 100% satisfied)
- Lightning-fast communication
- Unbeatable turnaround time
- Undivided attention from our team
- Did I mention you keep 100% of your royalties?
We give you the best the publishing industry has to offer, and we provide it at incredible speed and quality.
We’re here to help
We love getting to know you and interacting with you—it’s what makes our company and team so great.
More than anything, we want to help you. If you have questions about anything, we encourage you to ask. Whether it’s about our services, our policies, a general question about print or ebook publishing, or even if you just want to tell us about yourself, you can leave it in the comments or click on Contact, and we’ll get back to you lickety-split.