eBook Cover Design: Getting It Right The First Time

With so many peo­ple putting together an eBook to either sell to make money or to give away as a free­bie to pro­mote their online busi­ness, a ques­tion of how to present the fin­ished prod­uct comes to mind. As the self pub­lisher moves closer to the pub­lish­ing dead­line, the inevitable issue arrives: what about the book’s cover?

Before you jump on in and start design­ing a cover, you need to know both your tar­get mar­ket and the meth­ods by which you intend to pub­lish. Are you going to have a PDF book, a Kin­dle eBook or a self pub­lished book via a print on demand printer? Maybe you will choose a com­bi­na­tion of all three.

If you are already a mas­ter of Pho­to­shop soft­ware you might not need too much help in the cover design area. If, how­ever, you are like the major­ity of self pub­lish­ers, your viral cam­paign needs to take advan­tage of the best book cover possible.

Book­cov­er­pro pro­vides soft­ware for you to design book cov­ers from scratch or by using a range of good qual­ity tem­plates, where you just change the col­ors, styles, text and pic­tures. You can pre­pare your cover for use on a real pub­lished book, for your next Kin­dle (or Nook) sale or for a PDF book. There are also free ver­sions of other soft­ware on the inter­net or you can use a Word template.

The right genre

If your eBook is about the next best diet then your cus­tomers will need to know what they’re going to get just by look­ing at your book cover, per­haps by show­ing a before and most cer­tainly an after the diet pic­ture. A roman­tic genre reader won’t want blood and gore on the front cover and a wood­work­ing man­ual won’t require a dog chas­ing sheep pic­ture for the cover.

Your cus­tomer should be able to pick up your book (or look at it on the screen) and know what genre the book falls into, what the book is called, what it is about and who wrote it.

A non­fic­tion book cover should be closer to sim­ple than com­pli­cated as this is how almost all books look in your local book store (if you can still find one). You, like your cus­tomers, will have pre­con­ceived ideas about what cov­ers should look like.

If you are sell­ing a ser­vice, the cover needs to tell your cus­tomers that you can be trusted.

Which font?

Decid­ing which font to use is not any eas­ier than choos­ing the right genre. Go to your favourite online book­store and see what cov­ers peo­ple use in your cho­sen genre. This will show you which fonts are used and which are avoided.

You need to think ahead to which method of book deliv­ery you will be using. Your cover has to be as read­able in a one inch thumb­nail ver­sion on Ama­zon as on a full size PDF edi­tion. Your cus­tomer must be able to read the title, sub­ti­tle and author’s name.

If you have included a pic­ture as well, this must all be easy on the eye for each cover size.

Some fonts work well for vam­pire mys­ter­ies, but won’t be of much use for an SEO con­tent eBook. Use of a vam­pire friendly font on your SEO book will lead your cus­tomers to click away from your web­site quite quickly. Clear and easy to read fonts work much bet­ter than fancy fonts.

Non­fic­tion essentials

If you are prepar­ing a non­fic­tion book or eBook, your cus­tomer will need to know why you are the cho­sen expert in the sub­ject. What qual­i­fi­ca­tions do you need to dis­play to impress your reader? Only if you are a well known celebrity can you write on a sub­ject you can­not pro­fess to be an expert in, oth­er­wise your cus­tomer will not have con­fi­dence in pur­chas­ing from you.

Nev­er­the­less, if you can prove you have made a half mil­lion dol­lars with your SEO plans, that alone will be suf­fi­cient to show your read­ers that you know what you are talk­ing about. You do not need to be a doc­tor or a for­mer Pres­i­dent to show your skills.

Bul­let points are often used by non­fic­tion writ­ers to list 4–6 main points to intro­duce the reader to what they will be buy­ing. Use them effectively.

The blurb

Once you have looked at a book in a store, you always turn to the back to see what the book is really about. This is your one and only chance to impress your poten­tial reader to open their wal­let for their credit card. Make it pull them into the inside pages. Just 100 to 300 words will do.

Also… don’t be tempted to include a pic­ture of your face unless it’s a non­fic­tion book. Wait until you are well known.

Finally; don’t for­get the ISBN num­ber and coded box to enable real print sales. With­out it, offline stores won’t stock your book and online stores might strug­gle to list it.

I really hope you found this infor­ma­tion help­ful, but one of the tough­est things for an author to accom­plish is to get pub­lished… and then get their works SOLD.

What I’m about to show you a sys­tem for pub­lish­ing your book so fast that you won’t believe it until you actu­ally see it. You’ll find out all you need to cre­ate the ebook in the for­mat Ama­zon needs and you’ll learn exactly what to do and what Not to do.

So, if you want your work to be imme­di­ately avail­able to a hun­gry audi­ence of more than half a mil­lion avid read­ers on Ama­zon, the world’s largest book­store - I HIGHLY rec­om­mend this book. Check It Out Here…