Successful self-published authors tend to talk more about their marketing efforts than the ins and outs of how they created the actual book.
If the popularity and ease of self-publishing has you thinking it’s easy, think again. The access to sales and distribution has never been better, but what you’re up against in the competition is incredibly steep. Believe it or not, just a few years back a very well supported self-publishing guru strongly advocated for the reasons why you should skip a professional book cover designer and just make it in MS Word. While this seems laughable now, many of those books are still for sale on Amazon. I didn’t say they were selling. They are for sale.
Are you the Writer, Publisher and Book Cover Designer?
It was 2012 when self-published authors really started to see big-time success with the New York Times bestseller list (John Locke comes to mind) and extraordinary Amazon rankings in the top 1% (Hugh Howey, Rebecca Donovan, and Edward Hayden to name a few). A handful of self-published authors finally started earning significant salaries.
Self-publishing has overcome disproportionate odds and knocked down well over one-hundred years of fortified industry barriers. A question, nonetheless, continues to rattle around in my head. With so much self-publishing success, and so many talented diy writers, why do we still see so many amateur book cover designs?
Thanks to the many advances in print-on-demand and electronic publishing, unknown authors can now succeed in a profession previously reserved for those “discovered” by major publishing houses. Now, a single person may be the writer, marketer, and book cover designer. Most of us are fortunate to have a single one of those talents; we’d never imagined needing all three.
It seems many self-publishers, especially those new to the game either underestimate the power of visual first impressions, or they over estimate their own abilities. As a self-published writer, are you also the book cover designer? There are many articles in this blog that can provide plenty of tips to the budding book cover designer, or you can opt for one of the many options we offer to help people through the process.
You Can Design Your Own Book Covers
Crafting a story or chronicling an event involves detailed attention to voice, narrative and composition, not to mention grammar and sentence structure. Cover design requires an arsenal of entirely different skills, and too often, they’re skills that writers don’t have.
In my experience, most independent authors would love access to a professional book cover designer. Cost is a major hurdle for many, which leaves them no option other than to do it themselves. Unfortunately, lack of adequate resources and basic design instruction has led to a lot of disappointing results. More than likely, most of these folks have an inner book cover designer, they just need some pointers to make it look polished and professional. After all, you know a good design when you see one. Right? All you need are the right tools to create one and hopefully you’ll find at least a few on our website.
Next Article: Covers that Increase Book Sales
By Stacie Vander Pol