Indie Book Covers

 There's an old saying, "You can't judge a book from its cover."  It means that glancing at something's exterior won't necessarily tell you all the complicated and interesting things within, and many an excellent book (among other things for which the book is a metaphor) may have a nondescript exterior.

But this saying does not apply to indie book publishing.  In a bookstore full of traditionally published books, someone may wander around, be intrigued by a title or a cover, or go to their favorite part of the store and see (for example) a new book on the US Civil War they haven't seen before, and pick it up.  Some of the titles they see will jog a memory of seeing that book reviewed favorably by (for example) the New York Times, or seeing it on a best-seller list.  The cover image isn't all that important.

This is why you will often see these days a traditionally published book that doesn't even have a cover image, just the title in interesting script on a solid cover background, or at most maybe a tree or an abstract shape.

Things are different for indie books.  There is no physical bookstore where someone may wander, looking at a finite number of books, selected by the staff as worthy of buying and reading.  Instead one is on an on-line bookstore, along with literally millions and millions of other books (including traditionally published ones), knowing perfectly well that a lot of the books are not worth buying.  (The advantage of indie publishing is anyone can publish. The disadvantage of indie publishing....)

So the cover becomes very important.  A well done cover serves a lot of purposes.  If interesting and intriguing, it can catch the potential buyer's eye.  If professionally done, it is a marker that the author cared enough about her book to try to do everything right, including (one hopes), story, editing, and formatting.  The style and content of the cover tell the genre:  a passionate-looking couple for romance, rockets or planets for science fiction, a pastoral scene with a church for a book of religious musings, and so on.

The cover's whole purpose in life is to make the potential reader look at the book's description and read the first few pages, then, one hopes, push the Buy button.  The cover is not strictly an illustration of any particular scene in the book, but it should convey something of the flavor of the book.

For example, A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, has a great cover by Tom Kidd.  It indicates without a doubt that this is fantasy, but the wizard hero's rueful expression, pile of books, and lack of swords indicates that this is not epic fantasy and has a good touch of humor (the title helps).

 

Tom Kidd read the whole book before he started painting the cover, but often the artists whom indie authors get to do their covers will just take suggestions from the author as to what the cover might show, in a simpler illustration.  Dane of EBook Launch did a very nice cover for me of The Starlight Raven without actually reading the book.  A young woman suggests the book is for and about teens (which it is), and in the front there's a raven with stars in its feathers.

In other cases, I've bought covers from graphic artists who put interesting covers together from stock photos, then I added my own title and author name to this "pre-made" cover.  Such was the case with Shadow of the Wanderers.  This one, the potential reader should be able to tell at once, is epic fantasy with a strong Norse component.

 

And sometimes I've used my own photographs. A picture of a staircase in the ruined castle of Fleckenstein, in Alsace, is on the cover of my (non-fiction) Positively Medieval.  I like it because it is very clearly authentically medieval, old and worn by many feet over the centuries, and because it seems to draw the reader into the book.

Self-publishing is free, but the serious indie author has got to assume that she'll be paying for a good cover at some point.  Without that almost subliminal hint that the right cover can give the potential reader, the book may never be bought and read.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023