The importance of book covers – Part three
With most products the key factor is the packaging. Many people will never sample the most delicious food item if the packaging doesn’t do its job to entice potential buyers and suggest that eating the food will be a pleasant experience. The same applies to wine, beer, or soft drinks with poor labeling. Many products have suffered from poor packaging and never been able to recover.
Don’t let that happen with your book by paying too little attention to the cover and its potential impact, not just on the sales of that particular title but also on your reputation as a writer. Bad publicity has a tendency to stick around much longer than most of us would like. Movies benefit from good trailers, even though the movie itself may not meet the viewer’s expectations. However, if the trailer and any other publicity persuade people to go and see the movie but they were then disappointed, the packaging, in this case the trailer, still did its job.
The objective of the cover is to entice people in and get them to pick up the book. In the case of ebooks, the cover is designed to get the book noticed online among millions of other images. If all goes well and the cover creates a good first impression, people visiting the bookstore website will press the download button. A bad cover can ruin a book’s potential while a good one can often result in great sales.
