The book cover is the face of the book. It should contain a book cover design that can catch the eye of the person who sees it for the first time. Simply put, the book cover tells a visual story, it creates a link between the reader and the author. The wise men say, ‘Don’t judge the book by its cover’, but the truth is people do make an impression about your book through your cover and it plays a crucial part in the customer’s buying journey.
The following tips will help you boost the selling of your book with a book cover that’s best suited for your readers.
1. Make design concepts
The book’s cover and the blurb are two driving factors for your book to make it the reader’s shelf. So, it’s important to have your blurb ready before you start working on the design. This will help you or your designer align the book cover with what the blurb is trying to communicate.
If you’re planning to hire a designer which is usually the case, summarize the entire book into two or three sentences to provide an idea about the content of the book that you’ll be sending out to the designer.
At this point, doing market research is your best bet. Research online for best-selling books in your genre. Gather the common characteristics of the book blurbs and covers of popular books – it will help you implement them in your book cover. Run down to the bookstore and see which book catches your eye. Pay attention to the reasons that made you like the book cover design. Doing a comparison between different book cover concepts will be an advantage when selecting the ideal book cover for your book. These strategic moves will aid in finding the most suitable book cover design for your book.
Alternatively, you can also reach out to your colleagues, friends, and family member to find out their favorite book cover design concepts before proceeding. It may give you an insight into what is catching their eye.
2. Getting best designs
After having a bunch of ideas or concepts, you can work your way up to making the concept a reality. Many freelance marketplaces have verified designers specializing in this niche. Designhill is a great platform to get the best designs for your book cover – they have over 150,000 designers to choose from and you can go for a designer skilled in book cover design. The platform also offers a do-it-yourself tool or as you may say, a book cover maker.
3. Host a competition
Certain designing marketplaces offer the opportunity to start a design contest wherein designers from across the globe can participate and submit their designs. With a few simple steps, you can convey your requirements to the designers. They will come up with amazing book covers designed especially for your book. It is up to you to select from them and award the project to the winner. It is always an advantage to have a bunch of designers to make your choice from them. Designhill offers this feature on their website – you can easily choose your category and get started!
4. Set up a landing page
Now you have a collection of book covers for your book. It is high time to put them into testing. You can create few templates with the book covers you already have and publish them to get impressions of others. Social media is a great platform to get such opinions. Online polls are another effective way to select the best eye-catching book cover among the collection.
Once you have collected the data of your favorite book covers, it will be an easy task to proceed with the most relevant and most preferred book cover design.
5. Use mailing services
You can provide an opportunity to exchange an e-book version of your book with an e-mail address. It is not necessary to give away the whole book. You can add a few chapters of the book to an e-book and send it via e-mail to the people who signed up through your website or the seller’s page. This can be beneficial for you to gather more readers for your book. You can add your book cover as a promotional icon via e-mails. Having a collection of e-mails will help to promote books and reach readers.
6. Test the covers
Creating a landing page isn’t enough to take your book cover and book to the readers. You should drive traffic to the landing pages you created. Social media ad campaigns can be helpful to drive traffic to the landing page. You can get the service of a social media marketing service or you can promote your book via your social media groups and pages.
These testing will be helpful to make decisions accurately. Such a test will be a reason for a successful method of reaching buyers with the best book cover design.
7. Do a Final analysis
After getting enough data on the book covers, you can move forward with the best book cover design you acquired. These tips may unfamiliar at first. But, once you get used to them, you can just flow with the steps. Your next book launch will be more effective. As you know where to begin, what to do, and what shouldn’t do, it will save you time to select the best book cover to double your book sell.
A successful book needs a book cover to reach the heart of the buyer. It will help the book to stay ahead of the competition. If the book cover design is unique, people will remember the book by the cover. Such a book cover will be helpful to introduce new books of the same author to the readers with the same type of design. It will also save you time and money.