Book Covers: Tips, Trends, and Traps to Avoid for Better Book Sales [Workshop Replay]
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. That’s what your book cover is — a first impression for your potential readers.
A good book cover generates sales. It tells the story of your book. It makes readers want to open it and buy it.
It’s the visual hook for your book.
Because it is such a critical element, a great deal of care should go into book cover design. Authors, publishers, and cover designers must understand how the pieces of an effective cover work together — the images, the fonts, the models, the settings.
An effective book cover takes a detail from the larger narrative and reveals it. A detail seemingly small, yet strong enough to support the weight of the narrative without revealing its mystery.
The narrative abbreviated to its essence. That is design.
To make the reader want to buy the book.
Book Cover: Tips, Trends, and Traps [Workshop Replay] is available to help answer your questions about book cover creation, use, ad licensing.
In this workshop our guest is Jaime Reese, a professional book cover artist who specializes in photo manipulation. She is also a member of the Creative Law Center.
Jaime shares how an author or indie publisher can work with a cover designer effectively to achieve just the right look for a book. She will also help us understand the importance of securing the appropriate rights for those images, fonts, models, and settings.
Along with the replay of the workshop, you can download a form license agreement that you can use to secure the rights to use someone else’s image on the cover of your book. If you are the creator of the image, you can use this form to control the rights to your artwork. The form is a Word doc and is easily editable.
A book cover’s purpose is to sell the book. It is the quintessential book marketing material so knowing what you can and can’t do with it is important.
If you’ve been scouring the internet looking for guidance on how images are licensed for use as book covers, you’ve found the right right place.