Book Cover Design For Your Genre
In our fast-moving, modern world, we are bombarded with messages every hour of every day. Everyone wants to sell to us, it seems.
We cannot turn on a television or radio without fast-paced advertisements being blasted at us. We cannot walk past a shop window without seeing posters promoting the latest offers and enticing deals. Every truck and van carries a company logo of some sort, a “mission statement” and a contact telephone number and website address. Buses and trains are mobile advertising hoardings. Even police cars and ambulances advertise their mission to serve the public.
We live in a busy, frantic, frenetic, flashing, buzzing, raucous age where each merchant has just one chance to capture his audience and sell his wares.
Writing To Market
You know already that no author can write a book “for everyone” and hope to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive self-published indie author marketplace. Writing a book “for everyone” is the same as writing “for no one”.
Distributors such as Amazon, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Google and Kobo understand this very well. They know that more than 90% of their readers will be looking for ebooks within a very narrow range of genres. If the reader likes science fiction, then that is what he or she will look for. Generally speaking, this 90-percenter reader will never explore different genres such as historical murder mysteries or celebrity autobiographies.
In the same way, there are readers who like Fantasy. There are readers who like Gothic tales and there are readers who love Romance – and that is why you are here.
If you wish to write commercially, you need to write your stories to attract a certain type of reader. This is known as “writing to market”. It simply means you know what your readers want and expect from a story – and you give it to them.
Competition Is Fierce
However, it is not enough to write a brilliant story which meets all of your future readers’ genre expectations. The best story in the world is useless if no one can find it amongst the hundreds of thousands of other ebooksout there which are competing for their attention.
The figures are frightening. At roughly 23:35 Central European Time on Monday, 6th, March 2017, I took a few snapshots from the Kindle Ebook Store on the Amazon.com website. I looked just at the high level categories for the Romance, Fantasy and Gothic genres. You can see the numbers for yourself below. Even the Gothic category – the smallest of the three I looked at – represents an awful lot of competition.
The Nano-Second Glance
When there are so many books from which to choose, how does a typical reader make a decision? The short answer is that she will browse through their chosen category, glancing at each book cover for less than half a second before moving on to the next one and the next one and the next one … until something captures her attention.
Most of the book covers your future reader sees will be dull and uninspiring. She won’t even notice them. You know this is true because you are exactly the same.
Then there are those covers which hold her attention for just a moment before she moves on. They are often gorgeous designs – which is why your reader hesitated. But then she passed on. Why?
Genre Book Cover Design
More often than not, the reason is because, although the cover was beautiful, it was inappropriate for the genre of the book it was designed to sell. Readers expect to see certain things on their book covers as much as they expect to read certain things in the books themselves. In just the same way as story genres have their tropes, which are the things that the reader expects to find in the story, so the reader expects the design of the book cover to be appropriate to the genre.
What do I mean? Would you buy a Western cowboy book if the cover showed a young woman with a heaving bosom looking up adoringly at a handsome hunk of a man with ripped muscles? No. You want to see cowboys and horses and deserts on the cover of a Western. Young ladies with heaving bosoms belong strictly to the Romance genre. Even then, they only belong to a certain type of romance. Amazon recognises at least 22 broad categories of Romance and who knows how many sub-genres. Each one has its own design tropes, its own set of elements which readers expect to find.
Elements Of Genre Design
So – do you know what you need to have on your book cover? If not, then you need to spend time looking at what the successful authors in your genre put on their covers. Analyse what they have in common and then make sure your cover has those same elements.
If you do not spend this time to understand – literally – what your readers are looking at, you will suffer the same fate as most of your competitors. Your potential readers will glance at you for less than half a second and then move on.
Your Ideas And My Digital Art – Genius Book Cover Design!
Understanding what elements need to be on your book cover is only half of the battle, however. The second, crucial element is where your graphic designer – me! – comes in. Your book cover must simply jump out at people as they browse through the book store.
Putting the right things on the cover buys you less than half a second.
Making your reader go “wow!” buys you the click-inside which leads to the sale!
Together, we can clinch the deal.