Cover it...

Well, let’s assume that your book is ready, the editing is done and after many weeks and even months of polishing it, you are finally ready to publish it. What’s missing at this point? The cover! I don’t know about you but I am not capable of creating my book’s cover. I just can’t do it. Every time I tried, I created a mess that no one would ever like. So, what can we do and why the cover is so important?

To my opinion the cover is as important as the story. I’m sure you know the quote that says “Don’t judge a book by its cover” right? But the fact is that almost everyone judges a book by its cover. I personally do it all the time. I open a page with books and I scroll down to the one I like the image I see before I read the story. I know that this isn’t the way I should do it, but it comes naturally. When I see something I like, I immediately stop and read about it. Although I know that I have lost lots of good books because the cover just didn’t draw my attention and I have wasted time on others what just weren’t for me, it’s not easy to do differently. I know that many people do the same and that’s why we have to make our book’s cover pretty. An amazing cover though doesn’t mean that the book will be good, but it is the start for a potential reader to see it and maybe read the summary. And that’s our first goal.

What we do though when we can’t make a nice cover? The ideal would be to pay a professional to do it and it is for sure that we will be happy with the result. But if we don’t have the money for that, there are also other ways. If we have a friend we trust and he/she is good with this kind of stuff, we can ask his/her help. We could also use a default cover and personalize it, so it won’t be identical with another author’s work. This is the way I will do it with my adventure/crime novel. I know that this is not the best way but a really good result can come out of this and I will give it a shot. After all you can always change your book’s cover any time.

The point is that we need to pay attention to our cover too because it is the first interaction between the book and the reader. Of course that doesn’t mean that we must create a complicated cover with lots of stuff on it. A nice, simple and beautifully made cover can do the magic. And I personally like simplicity.

Good luck to everyone and let's just make some magic…:)