I meet a lot of authors as a book cover designer, and I’m always saddened and a bit surprised by how frequently authors are misinformed about the most fundamental aspects of what makes a book cover good at its job. Your cover might be the most important marketing factor in your book’s success, and most authors I know are actively sabotaging their books without realizing it.
So take a look at some of the articles I’ve written below to see how you can give your book a genuine chance at success.
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Indie Authors, Book Covers and Taxes – 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC Let me guess. You stopped writing long enough to buy the perfect fantasy or sci-fi book cover (or perhaps some character art) and now that it’s time to file taxes, you’re having to stop writing yet again to find out whether you need to submit…
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The busy indie author’s guide to sci-fi and fantasy book covers I create book covers for a living, and the number of self-published or indie authors I meet who unknowingly sabotage their success by not knowing what they really need when they get a book cover is staggering. Read on to learn how to get…
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The #1 mistake authors make when choosing a book cover Authors write brilliantly-complex, nuanced stories every day. They take life and somehow distill it down into these wonderful book-size adventures just waiting to be picked up by the right reader and lived in for a bit. It’s magical. And any writer can tell you just…
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For indie authors: New KDP template for self-publishing print covers Now that Amazon’s started offering the option to print hardback covers to authors, they’ve made some updates to the KDP template generator. Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know when it’s time to publish that paperback or hardback book. What’s new with…
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Covers are about Marketing with a capital M. That means, it doesn’t matter if the cover is the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen. If it doesn’t fit your book, it’s wrong for your book. So how do you know if it’s wrong for your book? Read on to find out.
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What exactly is a book cover thumbnail you ask? Well, this is a thumbnail. And so is this. Thumbnails are what we call the size of a cover when it’s shrunk down to a much smaller size like these two here, and I’d argue it’s one of the most fundamentally important aspects of book cover…
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That’s a really good question, and one that a lot of authors don’t yet know to ask. Unfortunately, this isn’t the type of thing an author can determine just by looking at the cover. Sure, you could ask your designer to see proof of licensing for the assets used in the work, and ethical designers…
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New authors often think that once they’ve purchased a book cover, they own the cover and are therefore free to do whatever they need with the cover. While this is a common misconception, I’m afraid this is almost never the case in the cover art world for a number of reasons. A lot of designers…
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Note: I write these articles based on questions I get from authors, so if you have a question you don’t see the answer to, feel free to ask me about it here. Perhaps I’ll write up a new article and add it here for you.
