As an aspiring author, you might be fully occupied with completing your manuscript and preparing it for publication. However, another crucial aspect that plays a crucial part in making your book a best-seller and bringing it in front of your target audience is the book cover,
If you want to sell more copies of your book and make a brilliant first impression on your potential readers, you will want to pay special attention to the book cover.
Yes – you read this right! Of course, your story matters too – but – when it comes to making a brilliant first impression of your book on readers, you will want to pay special attention to the book cover.
Your potential readers will be judging the book by its cover, which is why you will want to understand that first impressions matter because we all are in the same boat when judging books based on their covers.
With that said, when it comes to creating the best book cover that will actually attract your ideal readers, you will want to avail the expertise of a professional book cover designer.
Also, you will want to keep in mind the following tips to ensure that the book cover vibes with your book’s content and that it stands out from the crowd of books.
Keep reading!
Keep the Bigger Picture in Mind
When you think about your book cover, you will always want to focus on the bigger picture. Ideally, your book cover should be appealing to stand out on the shelf and attract potential readers so that they simply have to pick up the book to have a better look at it.
Now as a writer, you already know that there is a story lurking at every corner. So, you have plenty of things to write about. Suppose you choose to write a collection of short stories; you will want to design the cover to reflect what the book is about.
You will want to focus on the story’s title and other visual aspects. As a newbie author, you will want to hire a professional book cover designer to design the cover of your book. The professional will come up with the best book cover design that will attract your target readers to your book.
Put simply – the magic of the book cover designer will attract the target readers to your book. And once the ideal reader has picked up your book, they will experience the magical flow of your stories that will not let them put down the book until they have read it from the beginning to the last page.
However, you will want to keep this bigger picture in mind if you truly want to catch your target readers into the spider web of your words, sentences, and paragraphs – aka – your storytelling magic. This way, you will be using the book cover as bait to attract your ideal readers.
Don’t worry – the professional book cover designer knows how to play with human emotions and stirs their inner curiosity to learn more about the book.
If you want to provide the book cover designer with a rough draft about how you would want to cover to appear to your target readers, you will want to contemplate the answers to the following questions:
- Does the book cover represent the content of your book?
- Does the book cover induce intrigue and curiosity?
- How will the book cover stand out on the shelf?
While answering the questions, you will want to look at the potential book cover from the perspective of your potential readers. Think about the types of book covers that make you stop when you walk through the bookshelves, deciding on the book you want to read.
Integrate a Vivid Focal Point
If this is your first time publishing a book, you might be surprised to know that every book cover is deliberately and strategically designed to create a vivid focal point.
As an aspiring author, there is a great chance that you might also be a vivid reader – in which case, you might have already noticed that your eyes go first toward the clear focal point on the cover – before you focus on the rest of the book.
When it comes to the focal point of the book cover, it could be the book title, an artwork figure, some abstract shape on the cover, the author’s byline, and whatever else could potentially grab the reader’s attention.
It is important to mention here that none of this is coincidental.
A professional book cover designer knows how to intentionally integrate a vivid focal point to catch the target readers’ attention.
Simply put, there is a lot of science to this elusive art, also known as composition. It is nothing less than a magical skill that the best book cover designers have as they know how to maneuver the focal point in such a way that the potential by-passers and target readers stop and look to see what the book is about.
A book cover can have multiple focal points – but – if you as an author opt for integrating multiple focal points on the book cover, you will want to ensure that none of them compete or outdo each other. If you opt for multiple focal points, you will want to categorize them as primary, secondary, and tertiary focal points.
The layout of the focal points depends on the content, genre, and overall layout of the book. It also comes down to the type of impression you will want to make on the reader’s mind – but – you will have to ensure that the title and the focal point of the book cover are in accordance with the book’s content.
The last thing you will want to do is deceive your readers by planting a wrong idea in their minds.
You get the point – your book cover is a potent element of your book. It can either make or break your book. In other words, the cover can make your potential readers open your book and eventually make them want to buy it.