1. Literaturelady says:

    Thank you very much for this article.  New advice, new information–yippee!  I hope to be published eventually, and this will be helpful if I decide to go the traditional route.
     
    And to be honest, cover art is the first item that draws my attention to a book.  I love beautiful pictures.  🙂
     
    Thanks again for sharing!
     
    Blessings,
    Literaturelady

  2. Your welcome!  And I agree that cover art can help sell a novel. I’m waiting to see what Zondervan comes up with… I know they have their gears turning even now.

  3. A good book cover is great as an icon for the book. (Mind you, no book of mine’s ever going to have a great cover anytime soon as I’ll be having to self-publish and I’m poor and have no art skills.)  Perhaps only on a subconscious level, it’s saying ‘this is a real book not a sad unpublished/unpublishable ms.’

  4. Galadriel says:

    I’ve noticed this even with the free Kindle E-books I pick up. The generic “classic cover” isn’t too great, but it’s better than a blank space.

  5. Kessie says:

    I know I sure judge ebooks by their covers. Sometimes a mediocre story will have a great cover, but it got me to crack the pages for a look inside. Mediocre covers turn me off bigtime. I’m an artist and art snob. I know how much good art runs, but I also happen to know that digital editing of photos isn’t that hard. There’s lots of starving kids out there with Digital Design degrees who’d love to make a few bucks designing something for you.

    • Bainespal says:

      There’s lots of starving kids out there with Digital Design degrees who’d love to make a few bucks designing something for you.

      Yes, indeed. 🙂

  6. Mike says:

    Robert,
     
    I agree with everything you said about the importance of building relationships with other authors. Getting an endorsement from them can make all the difference in a prospective editor’s/agent’s eyes.
     
    True story: When I was trying to get author endorsements for my first novel, a sci-fi story akin to Independence Day, I hit upon the idea of sending a copy to Scott Carpenter, one of the original Mercury astronauts. I figured if I managed to get his endorsement, that would carry a tremendous amount of weight. I managed to track down his e-mail address, and sent him a very cordial e-mail, asking him if he’d be interested in reading my novel. To my surprise, his daughter responded to my query, and thought this would be a story he’d like. So I sent her a copy. A number of months later I finally got a response from her. Her father was too busy with speaking engagements to read the book, but she read it herself. She wrote me a very nice endorsement, which I included with the book when it came out. I figured the daughter of a famous astronaut was better than nothing.
     
    Mike
     

  7. Nissa—take Kessie’s advice and see if you can find an artist who needs some credits and cool art in their portfolio.  And like you said, that “subconscious” thing is pretty powerful. I know when I held my own printed novel in my hands it made it all so much more real.  I’d been writing for four years and it was all ethereal “in the computer”, so that was a big step for me, too, as I knew then and there that I had a real book… and it gave me a stronger vision to find a publisher.

  8. Galadriel and Kessie—I agree that even digital books need a cover, and that the cover can help sell the novel.  Just like that store… even if we shouldn’t think that way, its amazing how the cover can affect what people think about the contents.

  9. Mike—that’s a cool story, and a great endorsement to get.  I’ve made a few “really cold” requests for endorsements, too, and always hit a brick wall, so that’s an encouragement to me and everyone else—give it a try, you never know!

What do you think?