Proper focus on eBook cover design is essential for your book; even more so when you are self-publishing. Get your eBook cover right, and you increase its marketability, which when done properly, should result in sales for you. Get it wrong, and you risk people not even clicking your title in a digital bookstore. Read on to learn about deadly eBook cover design sins to avoid at all costs.
Doing it yourself
The great thing about the self-publishing process is that empowers you as a writer, or an author to write and publish your own books. In essence, there is so much you can do yourself. However, this DIY principle should only be applied to eBook covers for your titles, if you have professional eBook cover design skills yourself. If you don’t, do yourself a favour and get a professional designer to create a cover for you. Doing so will pay you in dividends.
Not being prepared to change
If you do create your own eBook cover design, write a good book, do a proper editing and proofreading job, and put it on the market, and it sells, then well done! However, if you get dismal sales, and you know the cover design is relatively poor, and don’t bother changing your eBook cover, this certainly won’t help. Instead, be flexible and get a new one done, by someone more skilled.
This is the beauty of self-publishing. Not only can you keep going back to your eBook, make updates and then put it back up for sale, you can also change a eBook cover design as many times as you want.
Not checking the visibility in thumbnail size
In order to maximise sales of your eBooks, you will most likely put them up for sale on digital bookstores, such as Amazon, Kobo and B&N. Potential buyers and readers will most likely find your title by clicking the image of your eBook cover design, which will them lead them onto the book page on a particular store.
Many of these stores display images of eBook covers in reduced size, or as a thumbnail. If you are getting an eBook cover design done professionally for you, then your designer should very well show you samples of designs he or she is producing for you in thumbnail size. However, don’t depend on him or her to do this for you. Take responsibility and request smaller sized versions of your eBook cover design, so that you can see how visible the design is in smaller dimensions.
The design needs to be a clearly visible in thumbnail size, so that you maximise the chances of people clicking onto the image. Otherwise, there is a risk of potential readers and buyers overlooking your eBook when they are browsing digital online stores.
Image credit: Diganta Talukdar on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0