Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Heather wrote: "I'm not convinced of how soon that will be..."

I'm with Gregor on this. Don't publish without a professional cover. If your cover artist takes too long, I can bring you into contact with my cover designer, Farah Evers. She made all six of my covers in four days, from my ideas to the finished product ready for upload.

Creating a cover is pretty easy with a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements for less than $99 (more like $60 on Amazon). And it's fun and satisfying. Sure there's a learning curve but authors are creative right?

In any case you must have a real cover that pertains to your book. Don't use a generic one! Things linger on the Internet for a long time and even if you change it later you'll see the old one for years afterwards.
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I do my own covers with Windows Paint, which came with the computer, and it's fun. And I must be getting pretty good at it, since no one has complained yet. If your computer has it, and you have a digital camera or some public domain pictures you can find online and download for free, practice with it and see what you can come up with. It won't cost you a cent to try.

I agree-you really need a cover. The girl who did the cover for my upcoming book was awesome, and it cost me under $70. It took under a week to work it all out and upload to make sure everything worked.

Sharon wrote: "This is what I find fascinating; I do my metrics a couple of times a year and my ePub editions *consistently* outsell .mobi (Amazon) by a factor of 5:1. Everyone's business is so different."

True (re experience varying). I started out on Amazon Prime and saw my sales drop to nothing over some months. Then I exited Prime, published through Smashwords, made one of my short stories permanently free (which Amazon doesn't normally allow), and started seeing sales on B&N. The sales aren't much, but they're consistent.

When the free story reached a B&N rank of about 3000, I was able to persuade Amazon to price-match, and now I'm seeing a little action there as well.

I've noticed that the volume of feebie downloads is much greater on B&N than on Amazon, but the ratio of people downloading the freebie to people purchasing the anthology, is about 1:150 on B&N and about 1:40 on Amazon. Not sure why this is.

Ed wrote: "Creating a cover is pretty easy with a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements for less than $99...Sure there's a learning curve but authors are creative right?"

There's a whole lot of difference between writing and visual art. I used to be a digital artist -- made a living at it, no less, and BTW, the learning curve to effectively use Photoshop is years, not days -- but I know better than to try to create my own book covers.

Done right, cover design is a very specialized skill that melds advertising, psychology, design, typography, and an awareness of the marketplace; it's not just throwing a stock image and some random words on a 6x9 canvas. The latter is how we ended up with the current plague of crappy indie book covers. Publishing is a business -- invest in your product.