More Covers

I concluded my last post with a thought about how authors should follow the monumental effort of writing a book with a good cover. This is an area that can be a little sensitive, and I get it. Self-publishing is not cheap. Even the cost of having a professional produce a book cover is enough to be more than a blip on the budget. As I was talking about in the previous post, people can tell when a cover looks cheap. If a writer is on a shoestring budget and only publishing on Amazon since anybody can do it at no cost, then it doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars on a cover. I published my first three books that way and two of the covers were made from photographs I’d taken of the New Mexico desert. Were they good covers? Gosh, no. Did I have money to pay for an actual artist to design them? An even more emphatic no. I guess that brings up the question some of us face: is it better to publish a book with a second-rate cover or to wait until I have the money to pay for a good one? You know how I answered that one with those three novels. Will I go back and get better packaging on those books? Maybe. When I wrote First and wanted to publish it, I’d put a lot of effort into making it as good as possible, much more so than the first three books. I felt the effort deserved professional packaging and distribution and fortunately, I was in a place where I could afford to do so. Even though it’s my fourth published book, I refer to First as my first professionally-printed book. The cover looks great when I pull up the page for the book on Amazon and B&N and Apple. It looks good on review sites. And it looks fantastic when I hold the book in my hands. All this to say that it’s clear when someone pays for a $60 fiverr gig for their cover as opposed to investing in their book’s success with a professional. And trust me, people do judge a book by its cover.