Where Professionals Publish

How a Homemade Cover Design Can Kill Your Self-Published Book

Years ago when I owned a bookstore, local authors constantly showed up peddling their books and 9 times out of 10, I could instantly tell when a book was self-published simply from the cover. Often times the covers simply featured text and lacked any depth or interest. I knew it would be hard to convince store visitors to buy those books. The unfortunate reality is that we do judge a book by its cover.

Cover design is one of the two most important elements when publishing a book (the other is professional editing). If your cover looks homemade, make no mistake about it, readers will notice.The importance of professional book cover design when self-publishing nonfiction books

I’m even willing to throw myself under the bus for this post! Years ago I published a series of workbooks and, ahem, designed the covers myself. What do you think of this workbook cover? When I look at it now I want to cringe!

Now here’s a book I recently published through my company, Authority Publishing. Our pro designer worked magic on the cover:

booked up - how to write, publish, and promote a book to grow your business

 

 

 

 

 

Can you see the difference?

If you’re publishing your book yourself, I urge you to hire a professional designer—one who has experience with book covers. That’s another big distinction. Not all graphic designers have cover design experience, and there really is an art to making a beautiful cover. Here are some others we’ve recently designed:

   

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