I Can Just Use A Stock Image Library – Can’t I?
What A Strange Way To Behave!
Many self-published authors have a peculiar approach to the stories they write.
They will agonize over every word, every comma and every full-stop to get it just right. Some authors will even send their stories to as many as three editors in order to make their writing as powerful as it can be. They will use a story editor to make sure the story works. Then they will employ a line editor to make sure each sentence is as strong as it can be. Finally, they will send their work to a proof editor to check there are no spelling errors or mistakes in punctuation or syntax.
Most authors can understand why successful authors spend all that money. After all, your writing is your product. It is what you are trying to sell. It is the means by which you hope to earn your living.
So far, so good. Even if you cannot afford the expense of three editors yourself, you are nodding your head in agreement. It makes sense to make your writing as polished as you can because you want your books to stay around for a very long time and to attract readers and sales year after year. When you are earning good money, you, too, will invest in three editors!
Then something very strange happens. Those same authors go to a stock image library such as Shutterstock and pick an image. They then load the image into their favorite word processor, add a book title, a sub-title and their author’s name and call the resulting mess a book cover.
This is just such a bad, bad, bad idea. But why?
Great Story-Telling Is Never Enough
Many writers are wedded to the idea that, if their story-telling is good enough, readers will come to them. A surprising number of would-be indie authors do not seem to understand that they are actually running a business. The business they are in is the story-telling business – but it is still a business and you should always be thinking of it that way.
You Are In Business!
Businesses sell services or products. You sell products.
Stop and think about that for a moment.
You are not just hoping people will find your stories and like them and perhaps even buy a few of them. You are selling a product. It might be an ebook product or a paperback product or an audio book product but, whatever it is, you are in the business of selling products.
Understanding that one simple fact is the key to understanding why you need a professionally designed book cover. Your book cover is actually a very real part of the product you are trying to sell.
Planning For Success
Are you serious about planning for commercial success? Here’s a little exercise for you. It will take about 30 minutes of your time – but it will be time well spent. You will need pen and paper. Divide the page into two columns. Give the first column the title “Seen It Before” and the second column the title “Looks Interesting”.
Now go to Amazon. From the Kindle ebook categories, pick the one which best describes the sort of writing you do. Start looking at the covers. Only give yourself a second or two for each cover.
If the cover looks interesting, make a note of the title of the book in the “Looks Interesting” column.
If the cover does not hold your interest even for a second, move on.
If the image on the cover looks familiar, place a tick (check mark) in the “Seen It Before” column.
For the purposes of this exercise, do not click through to the book itself. Do not be tempted to “Look Inside”. You are making an instant judgement on the book covers you see.
What You Just Learned
It will take you a little while to get your eye in but, when you do, you will quickly realise that:
Most book covers are uninspiring
Many authors simply select an image from a stock image library such as Shutterstock and just stick their own title and name over it.
Worse still, they are all attracted to the same image in your genre so you see the same thing again and again.
A few authors have truly outstanding book cover designs which catch your eye, pique your interest and tempt you to investigate further.
Here is another exercise for you to do. As before, don’t bother unless you are serious about your writing business.
Go to Amazon again. This time, choose a category of Kindle ebooks which you would not ordinarily read. So, for example, if you read and write Romance but never read thrillers, choose a thriller category. The idea here is to remove as much bias towards favorite authors as possible.
Spend 30 minutes looking through your selected category and deciding which books you might like to read. You only have a moment or two for each book cover you see.
At the end of these two exercises, you should have convinced yourself that excellent book cover designs make an essential contribution to the success of any writing business. Why is that?
Spelling It Out
Hundreds of thousands of people all around the world want to earn their living by writing. Most of them are truly dreadful but platforms such as Amazon give them the same access to readers as you have. The independent book market is like a Middle Eastern souk or bazaar. It is noisy, colorful and crowded and there are lots of other people trying to sell the same sorts of things as you.
So you need to shout louder. You need to grab the attention of the passing crowds. You need to get them to stop and examine your wares.
And a stock image from an image library simply is not different enough, individual enough or sufficiently eye-catching to do the job.
Look at your two lists. How many of the hundreds of books you skimmed through actually gave you pause?
Quite.
A picture really is worth a thousand words
Wherever you sell, you will be just one of thousands of products that people see when they skim through the thousands of books on offer.
In a packed digital marketplace, you need
to stand out from the crowds
to be in Column Two of each and every mental list of each and every potential reader
a professional graphic designer
a professionally designed book cover
to plan for success
You wrote an extraordinary story. Now it needs an extraordinary design.