We live in favorable times. We no longer need to find an agent, then wait for months while the agent finds potential publishers for the book. Before you would wait for years until a publisher was found and your book was available for sale.
And what’s the situation now? These days self-publishing a book is easy and fast. Basically anyone can do it. Anyone who has written a book that is…
Well almost…
There are few things that need to be done after that and they have to be done well, so the book finds readers at the end.
Since the self-publishing is so easy, there are many books being published every day. This means that the competition is very high and your book has to stand out of a huge pile of other similar books. Maybe your book is much better, but one will not know until he buys it, right?
So we have to make sure that what potential readers see before buying the book is attractive, irresistible and almost perfect.
And what do potential readers see first?
The book cover
Ordering a book cover from Fiverr is the most affordable option. You simply pay $5 and get a cover. Unfortunately what you get does look as cheap as it costs most of the time. And believe me, with a cheap looking cover you won’t get too far.
Professional covers are pretty expensive and I realize that not everyone can afford those. I couldn’t either. That is why I chose pre-made covers for my books. At least they looked much better than the Fiverr ones and you can get those for under $100. Besides, sometimes you don’t imagine your book cover well enough to provide the designer with details of what you want. In the case of the pre-made cover – you see it and either like or not.
Take into account that the cover images on Amazon for example are very small. So your cover should be readable even when it’s a thumbnail image.
What I would suggest is making a mini marketing research. Look through the bestsellers in your book category and see what their covers look like. That can become a good starting point.
In any case, no matter what you decide, please bear in mind that your book cover is crucial and people have to be attracted to it in order to notice your book at the first place.
The book title
To me, both the book cover and book title are equally important. They kind of go together hand in hand. The title should intrigue the potential reader to want to know more about the book. The title should lead the reader want to read the book blurb. It is yet the other element, which makes the reader stop from moving to the other book and stop for a second to learn more.
I personally am rarely attracted to very long title. Short and clear titles are the ones I like most.
The title should immediate grab attention and that is quite difficult to achieve with very few words.
Once you come up with several possible titles it’s a good idea to get feedback on those. Often the authors may think that their title is clear and understandable but to make sure that it is ask someone who knows nothing about your book to provide feedback. After all that’s who will be looking at your book cover and title – people who at that stage know nothing about your book.
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The book blurb
Not everyone reads the book blurb before purchasing it, but many do. They will get to it if your book cover and title are good. If not, most probably they won’t be spending time reading it. That is why I have the blurb at the third place here.
The blurb helps potential readers understand whether that particular book is their piece of cake or not.
Sometimes writing the book blurb is harder than writing the book itself. Why? Well because this is different. Here we should talk about copywriting rather than creative writing. The blurb is your selling pitch.
You can do the same as for the covers – look at the bestsellers of your book category and read their blurbs. Do you notice any similarities? Do you get the general style?
I personally don’t like very long blurbs, especially if they reveal too much of the story. I mean, if you re-tell your book’s story in a blurb and I get to know almost everything what is left, right?
Try to evoke curiosity and intrigue the reader so he finds out the details while reading the book and not the blurb.
Amazon’s Look inside feature
Amazon has a Look Inside feature, which may also help convince people to buy your book. It provides the opportunity to look inside the book and read part of its content.
Which part you may ask. Well Amazon mentions that “You can define percentage viewable limit between 10% and 80% in increments of 10 percent for your books. All books start with a 20 percent default viewing limit.”
This feature will help people, who look inside your book to read a bit, find out your writing style and get hooked to the story, so by the time it stops they purchase the book because they want to know what happens next.
There isn’t much you can do here. If you have written good quality content and hook the reader from the very beginning of the book, then all is well.
As you see all the above points have their own role in the decision making process. I know that many of us are very impatient to publish the book as soon as it’s ready but please take extra time to make sure that the other components are also well done. If they are not you might end up having very few people to find out how good your book is.
Note:
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