“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
Sure you can. Most people do. And the thing is, it doesn’t matter if their assessment is right, because they’ll never know.
If someone looks at a book cover and judges it to be of poor quality, or not interesting, and they believe the contents of the book are the same, what are the chances they will read the book to see if they’re right? Zilch. Nada. Because there are too many other books out there, books with far more interesting covers that will draw their attention, and ultimately their reading time.
The two biggest mistakes I see indie authors making are releasing books with poor (or no) editing, and books with bad covers. I’m not qualified to talk about the editing part other than to say, if all you are doing (and when I say “you,” I’m referring to my fellow indie writers) is hitting spellcheck on your Word document before uploading it to Amazon, then perhaps your work is not of the highest quality and you should be rightly shunned by the reading populace.
Harsh, I know. But there’s too much competition out there and one poorly edited book by an indie author reflects on the rest of us who employ beta readers and hire editors. It makes us all look bad, is what I’m trying to say.
A slight digression:
I remember seeing a self-published book on Amazon a few years back that was written in all capital letters. Which makes me think if there’s an audio version, it’s the author shouting the story. See, that guy? That author? He could have used an editor who, hopefully, would have suggested lots more lowercase letters.
Back to the whole cover thing:
A good cover will make someone stop and look. A good cover will get a bookstore patron to stop, pick up the book, and read the synopsis on the back cover. A good cover will get an online shopper to click on a book and scroll down to the description. A good cover doesn’t guarantee publishing success. But it guarantees people will at least look at your book.
Now a bad cover? A bad cover is guaranteed to torpedo your sales.
Years ago, I signed with a small publisher (that’s probably now defunct, but whatever). They assigned a cover artist for my book and by happenstance, we lived close to each other. We decided to meet and discuss ideas for the cover. We had coffee at a local Borders (yes, it was that long ago) and wandered through the stacks of books, sipping overpriced burnt charcoal (Starbucks) and talked about good covers versus bad.
He pointed out book covers he thought were good and ones he thought were bad. His criteria was that the cover art should draw the eye inward to the center, whereas the “bad” ones didn’t have a direction to them. You didn’t know where to look; your eye bounced around the cover like a pinball.
And no, I can’t remember the titles of the ones he pointed out. Too many years of heavy drinking since then.
My point is, as an artist, he looked at book covers from a design and construction standpoint, much the same way that I read a novel and critique it on two levels: 1) as a writer; and 2) as a reader. Or vice versa.
Until my conversation with him, I had never considered there was a design flow to a book cover. To me, it was always either, “Huh. That looks interesting.” Or, “Well, that doesn’t look interesting at all.”
I’m not saying I totally buy into his stance that a good book cover should draw the eye into the center. But I do believe that a good book cover should be both aesthetically pleasing, and should make the casual book shopper stop at that particular book and say, “Huh. That looks interesting.”
The cover for my book AUTUMN MOON:
I love that cover. I remember when the publisher sent me an advanced look and I actually felt my breath catch. It’s beautiful. What’s the book about? It’s about werewolves, obviously. You can’t look at that cover and not know that.
More than that, I think it’s a striking piece of art. I loved it so much that when I AM THE NIGHT, the (sort of) sequel to AUTUMN MOON, was coming out from a different publisher, I contacted the cover artist for AM and asked him to do the cover to the second book:
I love this cover, too, although admittedly not quite as much. But I’m biased; I like werewolves a lot more than vampires (which is evident if you read the book…something you should absolutely do).
Here’s a comparison of what I think is a bad cover, and what I think is a good one. My buddy, Nick DeWolf first had his crime/dark fantasy novel FRIGHTFULLY EVER AFTER released through Fey Publishing. This is the cover they commissioned:
Nothing against the cover artist because frankly, I couldn’t produce something like this. I couldn’t draw a straight line if you spotted me a ruler and a T-square. But…
What does this cover tell you about the book? Having read the book (because I’m a fan of the author) I can tell you that the figure on the cover doesn’t look like the main character. Or any character in the book. So who is it and what’s the point? If I was glancing at a shelf of books and saw this cover, I would think it was the cover to somebody’s homemade graphic novel, and not a dark and twisted fantasy/crime novel.
The quality of the art, too, is not up to the standard of what’s inside the book. Sorry (to the artist), but this is the kind of work I would expect to see in a 10th Grade art class.
Nick eventually pulled the book from Fey and released it through Vintage City Publishing. This is the cover he commissioned:
Now that? That’s a cover that would make me stop and look. And that character is in the book. And it conveys the tone of the book — dark fantasy, crime, with a sprinkling of horror.
Bottom line:
If you’re putting out a book, make sure it has an eye-catching cover. Stay away from bad comic art. Stay away from stock photos and the do-it-yourself cover generators. Invest in a good cover the way you (should) invest in a good editor.