Mistakes I made Designing my Book Cover | Book Cover Design

Today I’m going to tell you a little story of why and how I changed my book cover – a time consuming and expensive endeavour, but one I feel was worthwhile fo’ shizzle!

When I first started off brainstorming for my book cover, I searched through hundreds of book covers that I thought looked really pretty and I liked the color and art of. (Basically I went about the process ALL WRONG) Here are some examples of the covers I chose, and went on to show my book cover designer for inspiration;

I told my book cover designer how I liked the colors, the art, the playfulness of the books, and gave them a picture of me on my wedding day (since I wanted to use a bridal image but did not have the budget to pay for a model at this point) to turn into a vector art image. I also instructed them that I would like to use the color scheme white and orange.

After several revisions, here is the design that we came up with:

For a few months I was pretty happy with the design. I thought it was fun, clean, professional looking and hey, it’s got me on the cover (actually my least favorite thing about it).

Then I read a great post by Susan Kendrick on the fabulous site Wow-WomenOnWriting.com about book design and asked myself whether the book measured up to the advice in her checklist:

• Your title or your subtitle contains a keyword or keywords related to your topic

Yes & No: Bride is in the title giving me some points, but I use the term ‘big day’ instead of Wedding day. For SEO reasons (as well as showing up higher in Amazon search results), it would be in my interest to use wedding in at least my subtitle. Decided to change this.

• The title is easy to say, hear, remember, and talk about

Yes & No: I deliberately included the word Wow! to make it more memorable, but it may be too long or hard to remember.

• Your book title is clear and concise, i.e. no one who hears about it or sees it, regardless of their background, will go, “Huh?”

Yes. If you speak the English.

• The title stands out from other books on this topic because of some unique feature or benefit

Yes – The 30 day part was always part of my unique selling point. There might be other books out there focusing on bridal beauty and fitness, but these generally have 6- 12 month timelines.

• It is not already taken -book titles can’t be copyrighted, but you don’t want your book confused with another one out there

Yes.

• Experts in the area of book covers and book marketing give you a thumbs up

?? My hubby liked it… I actually never checked with an expert, but I definitely think that this worth doing. I suggest that you submit to a site like reddit and get some feedback. What looks pretty and what works as a book cover are two different things (as I will explain later).

• It will give you the flexibility to create a series of related books, products, and services

Yes. It is already one in a series of ’30 Day Books’

• Your book title captures the attention of your target audience, which you can determine either by a focus group or online tools like Google AdWords

Yes. I ran Google Adword ads (using a $100 free coupon) and the word Glowing bride was chosen by my target audience (brides to be) over ‘Perfect bride’ and ‘Flawless Bride’.

• Your book title creates a defining brand that will grow your reputation and your overall business.

I hope so! Our company is called 30 day books because we plan to have a line of books that introduce a hobby or skill achievable in 30 days.

At this point I was already considering changing certain elements of the book (based on the advice above), but then I stumbled upon Joel Friedlander’s blog and after absorbing all of his amazing advice (note to self, this research should have been done before talking to a book designer), I realised that there was a whole lot more wrong with the cover. Here were two major problems:

Problem 1: “Use the background—Avoid white backgrounds, which will disappear on retailer’s white screens. Use a color, a texture, or a background illustration instead.”

Hmmm, after a few painful hours looking on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online, I realized that Joel was absolutely right. Books with white covers just blend into the background. Slightly problematic since these are my two primary retailers, and I need to do something to grab potential readers attention.

Problem 2: “Make your title large —Reduce your cover design on screen to the size of a thumbnail on Amazon and see if you can read it. Can you make out what it’s about? If not, simplify.”

Here is the thumbnail image of my book: (how it will appear on Amazon’s search results)

Oh dear. Now I have corrected vision and I still can’t properly read the title.

With all of this new advice I had procured from the book cover design experts (thank you!!!), here is the criteria I gave my book cover designer the second time around; (note how different it was from the first time. ‘Pretty’ is no longer my priority).

• The color must stand out against an online (esp. Amazon) background
• When it is reduced to thumbnail it should still grab attention
• Text should be big enough that I can read it on a thumbnail
• Font should be easy to read at various sizes

And based on the new set of criteria, here is the final product;

And at thumbnail size:

What do you think? New and improved?

I hope you can save some time and money learning from the mistakes I made – having the cover designed twice wasn’t cheap. I’d love to hear how you went about designing your book cover and any points you may have to add. Have a great week folks!