If you are planning to publish an ebook or a regular book yourself, don’t make the mistake of giving it a bad cover. I’ve written about this before, but it came to mind again today when looking at the covers of a couple of books featured in the bulletin from www.bookbub.com (see this previous post for details of how to get free and discounted ebooks from them).
The two covers are below. Please note that I’m not saying the books are bad. I haven’t read them and for all I know they’re both brilliant. But in my opinion the covers are bad.
On the cover above the typeface for the title is a bit jolly for a word like kidnapped, it seems more appropriate for a children's book.
The book is described as an espionage thriller but the image doesn't reflect that tone at all.
The eyes and part of the face have been crudely cut out, and having the bottom of the veil (if that's what it's supposed to be) overlap with the landscape doesn't make much sense.
The cover looks like it was done by somebody who never finished their Introduction to Photoshop course. Because of that it also screams "self-published". That doesn't carry the stigma it used to but bad covers are a reminder of the days when many of the self-published books were not very good.
How about this one? The title has a dark last letter on a dark background, making it look like Crushe instead of Crushed. The author's name also is quite dark on a dark background, making it barely readable. On the thumbnail version I can't tell what the image is supposed to be. I looked at a larger version of it on Amazon and found that it's a grapevine and bunch of grapes, behind a shattered window.
With ebooks the first image of the cover that potential buyers will see is the thumbnail. If that's not interesting and readable most will ignore it.
Apologies to authors Varda Foox and Barbara Ellen Brink (I had her last name as "Brin" until I double-checked on Amazon--the background makes the final letter of her name disappear totally). Again, I'm not saying anything negative about the content of their books but I don't think either of them is well served by their cover images.
