There's an old saying, "You can't tell a book by its cover." What it means of course is that what something looks like on the surface is not necessarily an indication of what it's really like.
However, when it comes to indie publishing, this isn't really true.
There are something like 7 million ebooks for sale on Amazon, at least half of them written by independent authors. It's going to be hard to find the book the reader might find most interesting in all those books. This is where the cover comes in.
A cover is an ad for the book. It should catch the reader's eye and give a sense of what the book is about. A look at the cover of my book,
"The Starlight Raven," will indicate at a glance that it is teen fantasy.
You may not even have thought about it, but if you go to a regular (physical) bookstore and look around, you will see that the most elaborate, almost-photographic-realism paintings are the covers for fantasy, that horror covers tend toward red and black, that SF has planets and/or spaceships (and rather angular lettering), that mainstream fiction (stories set in the modern world) often show part of a person but not their face, romance has people embracing (or at least standing close), and so on. (Medieval romance, like my
"Sign of the Rose," needs a castle too.)
Non-fiction often is illustrated with a photo, as is my medieval social history book, "Positively Medieval" (see below). Even the font for the title varies with genre.
So a cover doesn't really
illustrate the story as much as give you an idea of it. Its purpose in life is to look intriguing enough that someone who likes that particular genre will read the description (blurb). (This is what is on the back of a paperback.) If the description is good, with luck the reader will read the first few pages, whose purpose is to make the reader buy.
But how about physical (print) books? They need a cover too. The cover on a paperback wraps all the way around, so if it is laid out flat the back cover is on the left, the front cover is on the right, and there's a strip in between where the spine goes (with title). You may not even have thought about it.
One of the challenges for indie authors is getting good covers. You can make your own covers--I made the "Positively Medieval" cover from my own photograph. But with the explosion in indie ebook publishing, there has also been an explosion in services for the indie author, including providing covers. My "Starlight Raven" cover is an original painting by Dane of eBookLaunch. My "Sign of the Rose" cover is from SelfPubBookCovers, where graphic artists with some extra time on their hands create covers that they think would be interesting, using stock photos combined in interesting ways, and authors look through the (extensive) collection to find one that they think would work for their book. Each of these is sold to someone only once.
Amazon has their own "cover creator" for people who are both unartistic and cheap, where, for free, indie authors can pick an image out of Amazon's collection and put their own name and title on it. The problem here is that in a particular genre you may see the same image used again and again for different books. Better try for something unique.
© C. Dale Brittain 2018
For medieval social history,
see my ebook,
Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
