If you’ve ever wondered “How can I sell more books on Amazon,” or “How can my book stand out on Amazon,” then you’ll enjoy today’s guest blog by Jim Kukral, who designed the cover for my new ebook. Stay tuned for details about that!
Jim is a 15-year Internet marketing expert who has a design team he guides. This is important because it’s not the best thing to just hand things like book covers to artists. Artists like to make things look pretty only. Marketers know how to direct artists to make them sellable. Isn’t that why you’re writing a book?” You can learn more about his book cover designs – they are hot – here http://prleads.jfksell.hop.clickbank.net
I’m a happy customer and a sponsor!
How To Get Your Book Covers Noticed on Amazon
By Jim Kukral
If you haven’t noticed there’s a major publishing revolution happening these days. Now anyone can easily and quickly put a book up on Amazon for sale, without having to have a publisher. This has begun the official gold rush for existing and new authors. Now, hundreds of thousands of writers are able to sidestep the middleman and go direct to their readers. Oh, and also make a lot of money doing it.
Jim Kukral
When you self-publish you have to take on a few of the responsibilities that a publisher used to do for you. Those include things like editing, proofing and of course, cover design. All three can be outsourced to professionals you can find in your area or online. Today I want to talk about effective digital book cover design and how it can affect your Amazon sales.
So what makes an amazing digital book cover? As we all know the attention span of people who use the Web (me and you) is very low. We have become accustomed to finding what we need online as fast as possible and have learned how to scan massive amounts of information with our eyes in seconds flat.
For consumers that’s a great thing. But for anyone trying to sell anything online, it makes our challenge greater. As an author, we have only seconds (sometimes less) to engage a Web visitor and tell them a story about what the book is about.
Do a quick search over at Amazon.com for books in any genre, it doesn’t matter which one. Notice how you quickly look at the book icons on the page along with the book title, and quickly scan down the page. Notice how your eye is drawn to some covers and others not so much.
As an author with a new book coming out, if you don’t have an amazing and eye-catching book cover you’re going to have a tough time making sales on Amazon.com. Here are few tips to help you out.
Image Is Everything
First off, it’s important to realize that design matters. Sure, you could do your book cover yourself, or pay your nephew who’s in college $10 to do it for you, but what you will probably end up with is a home-made book cover. Readers are expecting more, especially on Amazon.com. Your book is going to be sitting right next to thousands of other books with professionally designed covers. Chances are that if you don’t fit in to what’s expected, a potential reader isn’t going to take a chance on your work.
The Thumbnail Matters
When you upload a book to Amazon, the Amazon system automatically sizes your book cover to an appropriate, preset, size for display on their website. There are a few thing you should know at this point so that your book looks as good as it possibly can.
Number one, you should follow the sizing guidelines on the Amazon KDP page to the tee. If you don’t, your book cover may end up looking garbled and hard to read. That’s bad. The other thing to worry about here is that if you have designed your book cover with small type, it’s probably not going to be able to be read without zooming in on it. That’s also bad.
When you’re scanning through Amazon notice how all the top selling books have great looking thumbnail images. That’s because the authors and their designers knew how to design the cover for maximum readability.
Images Count
Whether you want to use a photograph, or an illustration, or whatever, you should know that images help make your book cover get noticed. As most Web designers will tell you, when you add images of people, places or things into your design you have a much better chance at getting the viewer to relate. Why? Because pictures tell stories better than words.
If you have a book about aliens from outer space, there’s not going to be a better way to convey that than to have an alien like image on the cover of your book. If you’re writing a book about butterflies, well, you get the point.
The bottom line is that if you don’t have a readable and beautiful digital book cover your sales are going to be compromised.
Jim Kukral is the CEO of Digital Book Launch, a company that helps authors market and sell a ton of books. He is an author of five books of his own, and has been working on the Web as an Internet marketer for over 16-years. You can read more about Jim at www.jimkukral.com
Bold prediction: iPad will change books and publishing as we know it
Since I’m knowm for making bold predictions, let me put my neck on the line one more time. I’m usually right, so it’s a prety safe bet!
To look to future, I look to the past. Let me explain.
Back in the early days of publishing, monks and artists wrote books or copies Bibles and Haggadahs and other works. Each work contained not only black letters on white background, but colored fonts, large fonts to draw the eye and most important, illustrations.
When Gutenberg came along and invented the printing press, we started to see the book as we know it today. A bland series of pages with black on white text. Few illustrations, if any, because they are expensive to produce. And all the type was the same size. So you have no idea if one idea was more important than the other.
We saw the beginnings of the change when Jeffrey Gitomer started writing his marvelous series of books. Pick one up the next time you are in an aiport bookstore. They are easy to find since they sell like hotcakes. Why? Because Gitomer has gone back to the age of the scribes and took their best ideas. Namely:
- Different sizes fonts so you can see what’s important. It isn’t unusual to see one page with just one sentence displayed in 24 point type. That get’s your attention. You know what’s important.
- Different colored fonts. It’s pretty. Why does reading have to be dull?
- Short chapters. Who has a long attention span today? Need I mention Twitter?
I’m sure many authors would love to copy Gitomer, but their publishers won’t let them because of the expense of printing.
Enter the iPad.
Now authors can design their ebooks with type, fonts, illustrations and color, color, color!
All the new, bold design doesn’t add a penny to production costs.
You’re probably wondering. Why stop there? Why not add audio and video? Perhaps an interview with the author? Or video of a role-playing exercise? The sky’s the limit.
One final point. On a recent flight from Minneapolis to San Diego, my two seat makes each had Amazon Kindles. And everyone who passed by them asked them about it. Ebooks are hot and that’s going to change everything.
Your task: Start thinking about illustrating your books, just like you illustrate your blogs.