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    Cover Design Secrets that Sell
    Cover Design Secrets that Sell
    Cover Design Secrets that Sell
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Cover Design Secrets that Sell

    By Charmaine Ross

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Many authors write fantastic books. Books are easily skipped over in a competitive market. Successful authors know their book cover has to appeal.
    Do you have a book cover that just isn’t selling your book? Are you launching a book and want to give its best chance of success? Many authors spend hours writing their book, only to have it fail because the cover doesn’t appeal to readers. Successful authors know what part their book cover plays in the buying process, and how to leverage the cover to their book’s best advantage.

    This book teaches you to analyse the genre you write in, discover what readers are buying and why, and to how to nail the type of cover that will subconsciously appeal to a potential reader.

    You only have micro-seconds to stand out from the crowd. Don’t leave your book cover to chance. Deliver the kind of cover that will engage readers and give your book the best chance of success.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharmaine Ross
    Release dateOct 14, 2018
    ISBN9780463038826
    Cover Design Secrets that Sell
    Author

    Charmaine Ross

    My first foray into romance was as a fourteen year old where I fell hopelessly and eternally in love with my hero as only a teenager can. Instead of watching movies and staying up late, I would go to bed at eight thirty and continue my very romantic, very safe, love affair. Since then, I have fallen in love with many heroes, some less safe than what my teenage brain could possibly imagine. After earning a Fine Art’s Degree, a Diploma of Secondary Education and a Diploma of Marketing, I worked as a Graphic Designer in various advertising agencies as well as in-house marketing roles and am currently involved with digital marketing and everything web in my current position. But I always return to writing. Although I have travelled, I always return to my home town of Melbourne and live with my husband, two children and two cats in the ferny-greens of the Dandenongs. If I'm not working on my latest romance and falling in love with yet another hero, you’ll find me reading, watching and basically indulging in my addiction to any story on any media type I can get my fingers on.

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      Book preview

      Cover Design Secrets that Sell - Charmaine Ross

      One

      People really do judge a book by its cover.

      A book’s cover has one primary purpose: hook the reader. When designing a book cover, an author must speak the language of the customer and what they’re looking for before they’ll even go to the next step of reading the title or making it to the blurb.

      Your book cover is your number one marketing tool. It is hugely important to the success of your book and is the first in your line of defence in the decision making process to engage a potential reader.

      Your book cover must do several things within micro-seconds. It must attract attention, make an emotional connection as well as convey the type of story your book is about. If the cover fails on any of those points, your book will be passed over without a backward glance.

      The book market is extremely competitive. With one new book uploaded to Amazon every five minutes, your book will join the 750,000 to 800,000 books already uploaded. The job of your book cover is not just something that has to be created just because you need something to wrap your book up in. It is a piece of packaging that is vital the to success of your book.

      Did you know 95% of new products fail? The reasons are simple. People don’t have the time, energy or money just to buy a product, test it and see if they like it. They need a shortcut to make their decision, and that shortcut is the packaging. They will see the packaging as a direct representation of the quality of the product inside.

      Great packaging holds power. It can influence a person to use a product, or in our case, read a book. To understand how to create a book cover that will influence a reader to pick out your book, you need to understand how buyers make their purchase decision.

      The book cover is the very important first step in the decision making process.

      The decision making process

      The decision making process is a marketing term that describes the psychological behaviour of a buyer that ends with a final choice to take action. (You want that final action to be that they buy your book.) There are many steps in the decision making process of buying a book.

      You might think that books would be a low involvement purchase. Most romance books cost less than a cup of coffee!

      Low involvement purchases usually involve little planning, previous thought or cost loose change. While you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, you might see a chocolate bar and you realise you’re hungry, or a magazine that snags your attention and you want to read up on a certain celebrity. You grab it and put it in line with the rest of your items to be bought. These items aren’t necessarily bought in impulse, but they are generally low cost.

      By contrast, higher involvement purchases have a higher personal risk and are complex. A car, house, new job are examples of a high involvement purchase. They are relevant and important to the buyer. Buyers engage in external problem solving and spend time comparing features and prices. These type of purchases involve a great deal of cognitive dissonance (anxiety) if they are bought and don’t live up to expectations.

      Books are a high involvement purchase. They require a complex decision making process because of the personal investment of the time it takes a person to read a book. Time is a commodity and there is a limited abundance of it. Readers want to be assured that their purchase (although low cost) will not waste their limited time. A book is actually a ‘luxury item’.

      Your book cover is the first step in complex steps to assure a potential reader that your story will give them what they’re looking for when they spend their time. You must understand how a potential reader thinks.

      Reasons why people buy books

      There are several reasons that motivate people to purchase a book and the process is quite complex, emotive as well as intellectual. The question you need to answer is, what motivates people to buy a book? The amount of reasons might surprise you.

      With a broad brush, people typically buy fiction books for entertainment, representing several hours worth of light or deep entertainment. Books are an escape into an imaginary world and escape from the real world. If a reader likes a book, they will read to the end. If they really like the book, they will recommend it to family and friends.

      People read because they find the book fun, interesting and they are able to emotionally connect to the story and the characters. They will tend to stop reading if the book becomes ‘hard work’ or they can’t figure out what’s going on. You book must seem effortless, although we all know how hard that is.

      Readers turn to books for companionship when they are alone or feel lonely. Fictional characters fulfil a ‘lonely’ gap and become ‘friends’. This is replicated in a series where a reader falls in love with a character and doesn’t want to let them go, just like a real friend.

      Books fill an intimacy gap. Readers might learn and experience emotional experiences alongside the characters to help them to understand themselves and other people. Readers of fiction might also read your book to experience a world gone by, or your idea of a future world. They can experience sounds, smells, sights, and tastes that they never could in their everyday life.

      Fiction allows people to experience characters in a way that television and movies do not. A reader understands the character through their thoughts, rationalisations, fears and faults which are dimmed when told ‘on screen’.

      Some of these books are ‘guilty pleasures’ – they are book readers don’t want to admit they like to read, and probably only recommend them to people they know also like books in the same category. These books have a high completion rate, and readers are voracious. (Think erotic romance here.)

      Readers will also purchase a book for future entertainment. These are usually books bought on sale, or if an ebook, downloaded on promotion, author promotion, BookBub or similar. However books obtained like this show large sales spikes but have a high probability of remaining unread and forgotten about, stacked beneath a pile, tucked away on a bookshelf or lost in epiles on a reader. The completion rates and recommendations are often low.

      People will buy and read non-fiction books for information and education. These books must be high quality (like this book!) and satisfy needs. These books must meet a specific need, for example,

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