What exactly would those things be? I’m guessing it’s to sell more copies and pique interest. Sure. But here’s the thing. You can attract people to get that free copy of your work, but they’re not going to be happy when the cover promises a lot more than or different from they get.
If you have a short story that’s a lighthearted character study, what’s the problem with having a cover that matches the theme?
A cover isn’t just to “make sales” its purpose is to make sure the people who buy your book are the kinds of people who will enjoy the content. That doesn’t mean it has to be poorly designed.
In fact, it sounds very much like you’re saying because this cover is poorly designed, we are to assume the story inside is also poorly done?
I mean, a lot of potential readers WILL make that assumption, because people DO judge books by their covers, but saying the cover was intentionally done badly to reflect the writing quality is…massively insulting to the writer.
badly designed is not “awkward” it’s just bad design. Your “art” looks like a snapshot, your font choice is not doing any work at all communicating what the story is about, the colour is wrong, the layout of the text makes it look like you’ve never paid attention to book covers before–seriously, how many book covers do you see with the title broken up and and squashed into the corner?
using the word “by” in your byline makes it look like a fifth grade book report. Look at the best sellers in whatever category your story falls into–look at the elements of their covers.
You want to know how I would do it? Well, assuming it’s a romcom, I’d check out current romcoms and see what their covers are like, probably do something like attached photo.
Pixabay has illustrations you can use, if you don’t want to pay an artist.
I use Pixabay all the time. I am, in fact, using illos I have from there, from a wonderful, wonderful digital artist, almost exclusively to create header sections on my new site. (I’ve donated more ducats to him that I likely would have paid at DepositPhotos, etc., in fact!)
This guy rocks SciFi and Fantasy, lemme tell ya. Does amazing work. Pixabay was nearly ruined when whats-its took over–what was it, iStockPhotos or Adobe?–but it’s survived and thrived, thank heavens.
I don’t know, it looks good, but it also feels generic. I’ll be honest though, I just think the original cover is funny. It makes me laugh and that’s pretty much all there is too it. But I get your point about the “by” in the byline. Now that you point it out, it seems very dated (if it were ever a thing…do you happen to know if it was common at any point in publishing history?)
Thanks for the advice though especially about Pixabay.
of course it’s generic. I don’t know enough about your book to customize it. I believe an author’s book deserves more than a five minute effort. But I’m not working for you, so you don’t get that effort.
If you decided to work with a cover artist, you both might decide to not go with an illustrated cover. It’s not obligatory, but it does tell a potential reader *at a glance* that it’s a book similar to other books they’ve enjoyed, which is exactly the point/purpose of a book cover.
You do you though–your publishing journey is yours to take in any manner you wish.
Oh, I should have realized that this book was your book. I honestly assumed that your comments were uninterested, but of course–they aren’t.
A cover has ONE job and one job only. It’s to be clickbait, period. It’s to instantly and immediately say to your prospective reader “Hey, this book is for YOU!” It’s to make them click. Nothing more and absolutely nothing less.
If a sci-fi novel’s cover doesn’t look like Sci-Fi, those are lost sales. Same with Romance, mystery and so on.
I have a customer that wrote a darling alternate history story about a famous individual from the 1880’s–and insisted on using one of the very few images that exist of this person. Doomed the book, because now it will be automatically viewed, at a glance, as non-fiction. She did this even though we made a SMOKIN’ fiction cover for her that would have gained clicks like flies to honey. SUCH a shame. She’s killed her own book. I hate it when that happens.
When I see a dreadful or inappropriate or NC (No-Clicks) cover, I blame the author. Sure, it’s easy to blame the cover designer, who should know better if s/he is being paid, but when push comes to shove, the author should not approve a bad cover. Because, as I said in the penultimate paragraph, they are killing their own book. No clickbait, no sales. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Well you probably thought my comments were disinterested because I really wasn’t emotionally attached to the cover in the first place, and I’m looking at it all from a business perspective anyway. I wanted to see if there was much interest in the protagonist before I spend any more time writing about her, and it looks like readers don’t really like her. So I’m not sure I’m going to take more time to develop stories with her as the protagonist anyway.
I understand the point about the cover being the best marketing material you have. But I figured that since the story was free, and always would be, I could generate enough of a test audience to take a look at it and get some feedback.
Stupidity, for deliberately killing off their own book. That’s what that is called.
Inevitably, this is the same author that will tell critics of his cover (it’s almost always men, for some reason) that “people will see this crappy cover and will click, on it, just to see how BAD it is.” Never fails, and of course, that clicking never happens, and the book sinks into the depths of permanent obscurity,
Um, are you a man? Because based on what you’ve put here it looks like you’ve had some experience in being one 😉
It’s crazy. You’re putting out what appears to be your real name and real business, but you decide to be very antagonistic in your response. Do you not realize you are necessarily inviting a hostile response in return?
I took a look at your business, because I’m open minded to improvement. I have to say though, to be honest, yes, your covers on average are slightly better than the one mocked here, but not by that much. What am I missing here?
Are you under the impression that the covers on some of the books we’ve produced on my site are ours?
If so, let me disabuse you of that notion–you are quite, quite wrong. At the moment, I don’t have a section for covers we’ve designed. I’m in the process of updating our site, to a whole new layout and look, and THAT new site will have cover samples–but at the moment, if memory serves, we have nary a cover that we’ve designed called out as such. Most of the books in the bookgallery are from 2011-2012, in fact–years before we started offering cover desing.
So…what and where are these covers, that you’ve decided are our designs, and which you are critiquing, if you would be so kind? We’ll all wait for you to point those out to us.
As far as my “tone,” I’m just relating facts. We see it here on LBC all the time–authors that get their backs up (gosh, who does that sound like?) and tell us that their covers are so bad or so unusual that someone will click on it “just to see it and understand why it’s that bad.”
That strategy never works. and without fail–Nathan will correct me if I’m wrong, most surely–almost invariably, the authors that go that route, the “I can’t be wrong” route, are men. Feel free to rummage around here on LBC, to find those posts and see what I mean. It’s just the facts, mon. Just the facts.
Okay; perhaps it’s the men that stick in my mind. I genuinely don’t recall any women that engaged us in post after post of arguments about how the buying public would click on the “so bad it’s good” cover.
I really don’t–and yes, I’ve been paying attention all these years. 🙂
The first one who threatened me with a DCMA takedown over copyright infringement was a woman… and the second one, a week after, using almost identical language, was also a woman (and probably her friend).
It’s true, we’ve had some notably combative men (I may have to add a “Public Enemies” page), but on the whole, I think both sides of the aisle have been well represented.
Hi: I don’t mean “people who’ve been offended and thence threatened LBC,” generally and inclusively.
I only meant the people who argue that people will click on a terrible cover “just to see” the full cover, or what the book is about, etc. THAT group.
I never meant for anybody to think that I meant that the only offended would-be cover designers or publishers are all men. Just that one subset, the “it’s so bad it’s good” category. I genuinely think, Nathan, that that particular subgroup is almost entirely male–but I’ll defer to your superior judgment.
(FWIW, at my shop, when we see covers like that and gently inquire about same, it is with exceedingly few exceptions, men. I do have a handful of women, but after nearly 8,000 books, the “so bad it’s good-ers” list is pretty much men.)
Whew! I was hoping it was just a misunderstanding! I was worried that my brains had gone gaga. 🙂 I do. I’ve been involved n almost all of those “so bad it’s good” threads and I *think* I’m right. But I’m sure someone will be happy to let me know if I’m not.
Are you under the impression that the covers on some of the books we’ve produced on my site are ours?
Well…yes?
You should make it clear that those covers aren’t yours if you do indeed do much better work than that. I don’t think I would be the only person to think that those covers are yours, since they’re in a section that shows your company’s work. I know I’m giving unrequested advice but I would not wait until the whole website is revamped before noting that not all those covers are made by your company. I think it would be better for business in my opinion.
Because you happened to think that the thousands of books on the site use our covers? Are you under the impression tht all the hundreds of formatters and converters out there are putting their own-designed covers onto the books that they convert? Do you also think that print book designers (which we also do) are only designing books for which they design the covers?
Nope. The vast majority of us are not, in fact, designing the covers for the books that we format, design and convert. Honestly, in 13 years it’s never crossed my mind that anyone would think that. For that matter, I think that anyone really looking at, say, the first 20 books on the Book list would realize that they are all so wildly different, such varied styles, that they very obviously are NOT from the same cover designer.
[Shrug}. THESE are some of ours–but again, only a sampling out of nearly a thousand:
Nope. The vast majority of us are not, in fact, designing the covers for the books that we format, design and convert. Honestly, in 13 years it’s never crossed my mind that anyone would think that.
Your website gives the impression that you do all those services simultaneously. Maybe I was careless in assuming that those samples were your cover creations, but I am probably not the only one who did that.
The covers look very nice. Why aren’t they anywhere on your website though?
I confess, in that article, that until I got into the book production business, I too thought that what was inside the covers mattered the most and that it was that, not the cover, that sold the book.
I was WRONG. Dead wrong. Couldn’t have been more wrong, and I have factual proof of it.
Books in series, to which I have direct access, which clearly show it over anything else. Crappy or dull, or dark covers, in that series. sell far, far less than all the others, even though the books are a series that has ongoing story arcs.
‘The readers are apparently willing to altogether bypass the continuity of the arcs, to read a book with a nicer, better, higher-contrast, brighter cover. By a huge amount. I’ve told this story, here, I believe, before. It’s absolutely factual–numbers don’t lie.
It’s shocking but true. Do yourself a favor and redesign that cover. Save your book. Seriously. We all, everybody here, want you to do well. That’s a fact. Hell, for that matter, try a few new layouts and come see many of us over on CoverCritics.com. For assistance in design. Or do a takeoff on one of Syd’s suggestions, which are ALL very good.
‘The readers are apparently willing to altogether bypass the continuity of the arcs, to read a book with a nicer, better, higher-contrast, brighter cover. By a huge amount. I’ve told this story, here, I believe, before. It’s absolutely factual–numbers don’t lie.
Good point. That’s really helpful to know, actually.
Patch Adams, eat your heart out.
I have heard of beer googles.
Rose’ wine tinted glasses?
You’ve never heard the expression “Looking at the world through rose-colored glasses”? 😎
Fortunately for us, they aren’t filled with moonshine.
It’s ironic, because this website has a lousy header image. 😉
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
Well then what’s the term for when someone purposely makes a tacky and awkward book cover for a tacky and awkward protagonist?
Oh, that’s someone who doesn’t understand what a book cover is supposed to be, or what job it’s meant to do.
What exactly would those things be? I’m guessing it’s to sell more copies and pique interest. Sure. But here’s the thing. You can attract people to get that free copy of your work, but they’re not going to be happy when the cover promises a lot more than or different from they get.
If you have a short story that’s a lighthearted character study, what’s the problem with having a cover that matches the theme?
A cover isn’t just to “make sales” its purpose is to make sure the people who buy your book are the kinds of people who will enjoy the content. That doesn’t mean it has to be poorly designed.
In fact, it sounds very much like you’re saying because this cover is poorly designed, we are to assume the story inside is also poorly done?
I mean, a lot of potential readers WILL make that assumption, because people DO judge books by their covers, but saying the cover was intentionally done badly to reflect the writing quality is…massively insulting to the writer.
The story is about an awkward protagonist. So there should be some element of awkwardness in the cover.
Let me put it this way – how would you have done the cover otherwise?
badly designed is not “awkward” it’s just bad design. Your “art” looks like a snapshot, your font choice is not doing any work at all communicating what the story is about, the colour is wrong, the layout of the text makes it look like you’ve never paid attention to book covers before–seriously, how many book covers do you see with the title broken up and and squashed into the corner?
using the word “by” in your byline makes it look like a fifth grade book report. Look at the best sellers in whatever category your story falls into–look at the elements of their covers.
You want to know how I would do it? Well, assuming it’s a romcom, I’d check out current romcoms and see what their covers are like, probably do something like attached photo.
Pixabay has illustrations you can use, if you don’t want to pay an artist.
I use Pixabay all the time. I am, in fact, using illos I have from there, from a wonderful, wonderful digital artist, almost exclusively to create header sections on my new site. (I’ve donated more ducats to him that I likely would have paid at DepositPhotos, etc., in fact!)
This guy rocks SciFi and Fantasy, lemme tell ya. Does amazing work. Pixabay was nearly ruined when whats-its took over–what was it, iStockPhotos or Adobe?–but it’s survived and thrived, thank heavens.
five minutes, with an illustration pulled from Pixabay and not knowing what your book is about.
I don’t know, it looks good, but it also feels generic. I’ll be honest though, I just think the original cover is funny. It makes me laugh and that’s pretty much all there is too it. But I get your point about the “by” in the byline. Now that you point it out, it seems very dated (if it were ever a thing…do you happen to know if it was common at any point in publishing history?)
Thanks for the advice though especially about Pixabay.
of course it’s generic. I don’t know enough about your book to customize it. I believe an author’s book deserves more than a five minute effort. But I’m not working for you, so you don’t get that effort.
If you decided to work with a cover artist, you both might decide to not go with an illustrated cover. It’s not obligatory, but it does tell a potential reader *at a glance* that it’s a book similar to other books they’ve enjoyed, which is exactly the point/purpose of a book cover.
You do you though–your publishing journey is yours to take in any manner you wish.
Thanks for the advice.
Oh, I should have realized that this book was your book. I honestly assumed that your comments were uninterested, but of course–they aren’t.
A cover has ONE job and one job only. It’s to be clickbait, period. It’s to instantly and immediately say to your prospective reader “Hey, this book is for YOU!” It’s to make them click. Nothing more and absolutely nothing less.
If a sci-fi novel’s cover doesn’t look like Sci-Fi, those are lost sales. Same with Romance, mystery and so on.
I have a customer that wrote a darling alternate history story about a famous individual from the 1880’s–and insisted on using one of the very few images that exist of this person. Doomed the book, because now it will be automatically viewed, at a glance, as non-fiction. She did this even though we made a SMOKIN’ fiction cover for her that would have gained clicks like flies to honey. SUCH a shame. She’s killed her own book. I hate it when that happens.
When I see a dreadful or inappropriate or NC (No-Clicks) cover, I blame the author. Sure, it’s easy to blame the cover designer, who should know better if s/he is being paid, but when push comes to shove, the author should not approve a bad cover. Because, as I said in the penultimate paragraph, they are killing their own book. No clickbait, no sales. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Well you probably thought my comments were disinterested because I really wasn’t emotionally attached to the cover in the first place, and I’m looking at it all from a business perspective anyway. I wanted to see if there was much interest in the protagonist before I spend any more time writing about her, and it looks like readers don’t really like her. So I’m not sure I’m going to take more time to develop stories with her as the protagonist anyway.
I understand the point about the cover being the best marketing material you have. But I figured that since the story was free, and always would be, I could generate enough of a test audience to take a look at it and get some feedback.
Stupidity, for deliberately killing off their own book. That’s what that is called.
Inevitably, this is the same author that will tell critics of his cover (it’s almost always men, for some reason) that “people will see this crappy cover and will click, on it, just to see how BAD it is.” Never fails, and of course, that clicking never happens, and the book sinks into the depths of permanent obscurity,
Um, are you a man? Because based on what you’ve put here it looks like you’ve had some experience in being one 😉
It’s crazy. You’re putting out what appears to be your real name and real business, but you decide to be very antagonistic in your response. Do you not realize you are necessarily inviting a hostile response in return?
I took a look at your business, because I’m open minded to improvement. I have to say though, to be honest, yes, your covers on average are slightly better than the one mocked here, but not by that much. What am I missing here?
TL:
And which covers would those be?
Are you under the impression that the covers on some of the books we’ve produced on my site are ours?
If so, let me disabuse you of that notion–you are quite, quite wrong. At the moment, I don’t have a section for covers we’ve designed. I’m in the process of updating our site, to a whole new layout and look, and THAT new site will have cover samples–but at the moment, if memory serves, we have nary a cover that we’ve designed called out as such. Most of the books in the bookgallery are from 2011-2012, in fact–years before we started offering cover desing.
So…what and where are these covers, that you’ve decided are our designs, and which you are critiquing, if you would be so kind? We’ll all wait for you to point those out to us.
As far as my “tone,” I’m just relating facts. We see it here on LBC all the time–authors that get their backs up (gosh, who does that sound like?) and tell us that their covers are so bad or so unusual that someone will click on it “just to see it and understand why it’s that bad.”
That strategy never works. and without fail–Nathan will correct me if I’m wrong, most surely–almost invariably, the authors that go that route, the “I can’t be wrong” route, are men. Feel free to rummage around here on LBC, to find those posts and see what I mean. It’s just the facts, mon. Just the facts.
Oh, trust me, there have been enough with female monikers that I’m prepared to call it a pan-gender attitude.
Okay; perhaps it’s the men that stick in my mind. I genuinely don’t recall any women that engaged us in post after post of arguments about how the buying public would click on the “so bad it’s good” cover.
I really don’t–and yes, I’ve been paying attention all these years. 🙂
(0∀0)
H.
The first one who threatened me with a DCMA takedown over copyright infringement was a woman… and the second one, a week after, using almost identical language, was also a woman (and probably her friend).
It’s true, we’ve had some notably combative men (I may have to add a “Public Enemies” page), but on the whole, I think both sides of the aisle have been well represented.
Hi: I don’t mean “people who’ve been offended and thence threatened LBC,” generally and inclusively.
I only meant the people who argue that people will click on a terrible cover “just to see” the full cover, or what the book is about, etc. THAT group.
I never meant for anybody to think that I meant that the only offended would-be cover designers or publishers are all men. Just that one subset, the “it’s so bad it’s good” category. I genuinely think, Nathan, that that particular subgroup is almost entirely male–but I’ll defer to your superior judgment.
(FWIW, at my shop, when we see covers like that and gently inquire about same, it is with exceedingly few exceptions, men. I do have a handful of women, but after nearly 8,000 books, the “so bad it’s good-ers” list is pretty much men.)
🙂
Ah, I misunderstood. I don’t recall a gender preponderance in that specific scenario.
Whew! I was hoping it was just a misunderstanding! I was worried that my brains had gone gaga. 🙂 I do. I’ve been involved n almost all of those “so bad it’s good” threads and I *think* I’m right. But I’m sure someone will be happy to let me know if I’m not.
Well…yes?
You should make it clear that those covers aren’t yours if you do indeed do much better work than that. I don’t think I would be the only person to think that those covers are yours, since they’re in a section that shows your company’s work. I know I’m giving unrequested advice but I would not wait until the whole website is revamped before noting that not all those covers are made by your company. I think it would be better for business in my opinion.
Good luck with your website redesign.
Because you happened to think that the thousands of books on the site use our covers? Are you under the impression tht all the hundreds of formatters and converters out there are putting their own-designed covers onto the books that they convert? Do you also think that print book designers (which we also do) are only designing books for which they design the covers?
Nope. The vast majority of us are not, in fact, designing the covers for the books that we format, design and convert. Honestly, in 13 years it’s never crossed my mind that anyone would think that. For that matter, I think that anyone really looking at, say, the first 20 books on the Book list would realize that they are all so wildly different, such varied styles, that they very obviously are NOT from the same cover designer.
[Shrug}. THESE are some of ours–but again, only a sampling out of nearly a thousand:
Your website gives the impression that you do all those services simultaneously. Maybe I was careless in assuming that those samples were your cover creations, but I am probably not the only one who did that.
The covers look very nice. Why aren’t they anywhere on your website though?
And apologies in advance if I misunderstood your tone (or anything else).
BTW, TL: you should see/read this article, that I wrote in (wowzers) 2011, on my site:
https://www.booknook.biz/tips-tutorials/cover-design-calypso
I confess, in that article, that until I got into the book production business, I too thought that what was inside the covers mattered the most and that it was that, not the cover, that sold the book.
I was WRONG. Dead wrong. Couldn’t have been more wrong, and I have factual proof of it.
Books in series, to which I have direct access, which clearly show it over anything else. Crappy or dull, or dark covers, in that series. sell far, far less than all the others, even though the books are a series that has ongoing story arcs.
‘The readers are apparently willing to altogether bypass the continuity of the arcs, to read a book with a nicer, better, higher-contrast, brighter cover. By a huge amount. I’ve told this story, here, I believe, before. It’s absolutely factual–numbers don’t lie.
It’s shocking but true. Do yourself a favor and redesign that cover. Save your book. Seriously. We all, everybody here, want you to do well. That’s a fact. Hell, for that matter, try a few new layouts and come see many of us over on CoverCritics.com. For assistance in design. Or do a takeoff on one of Syd’s suggestions, which are ALL very good.
Good luck to you.
Good point. That’s really helpful to know, actually.
Thanks, you too.