![]() What minefield/licensing traps follow?īottom line is that quality counts – and quality isn’t free. The expected life of the book can help in this calculation.Ħ. Totally up-to-the-moment designs key into an instant audience, but risk looking dated and cheesy in a year or two. Design is part of brand does this cover span a series, or is it part of a brand look to identify a particular author? (Typified for me by Isaac Asimov’s Panther paperbacks of the 1970s which all said “Asimov”).ĥ. What returns do you require from the book to meet these costs – amortised across sales?Ĥ. What is the cost of the artwork – a bespoke painting, or license fees on a photo? Here in New Zealand, commissioned cover art starts at around $1500 and license fees for photos are $150 each, upwards.ģ. Budgets have to be worked up, designers commissioned, and costs vs benefits assessed. I’ve provided commissioned paintings or (more usually) my own photos for book covers in the past. Everything has to be planned out. Indeed, even though mainstream publishers, by contract, have full authority over the cover, they’ll often consult with the author over artwork. My take? It’s no different for self-publishers than it is for mainstream industry publishers. History dead? Not when books like this sell so well. The bar has been raised very high, and if your book doesn’t meet it, then it won’t sell. The other bad news is that everybody’s doing it, anyway – the quality of most covers these days, whether from the main publishing houses, indie publishers or self-published – is stunning. Good news is that professional designers are adept at translating those concepts into visual form. That’s a good news, bad news story for self-publishers. Which, in turn, means it’s amenable to all the usual marketing methods – it has to provoke, excite, pose questions that demand answers. It is, in short, a key marketing and discovery tool. But most don’t – the artwork has been transferred to the cover.Ĭovers are even more important for e-books, where they become the front-end icon – the visual object that sets an e-book you’ve discovered, cold, apart from the others, that makes you want to click on it and see what’s within. A book may well be better than its cover seems to promise, but unless we’re specifically looking for the author or that book, there’s no question that the cover is what draws us to an unknown author and book. Some of the classier books still present a frontispiece. Go back a couple of hundred years and every book had a tooled leather cover – you had to open it to get to the interesting design part. My “Illustrated History of New Zealand”Īctually it isn’t that ‘old’, really. There’s an old adage that we must never judge a book by its cover.
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