If you take the time to observe the book covers for those books on the New York Times Bestseller List, you will discover that nearly all of those cover designs employ some type of custom lettering. Custom lettering takes time, and design time costs money–usually lots of money.

Although it is usually not cost effective to spend thousands of dollars to hire a custom graphic designer for your book cover until you know you will sell a few copies, you can however get some fairly high-quality effects with just a few hours of design time.

Here is a recent JuggernautPress.com cover design in which this concept is put to practice:

Can you see how the lettering has been manipulated to emphasize the concept of the book?

First of all, the main title letters are overlapping in a way that gives the impression that each letter is ATTRACTING those letters beside it.

The next design element employed here is in the subtitle. When a viewer first encounters the design, their eyes are naturally drawn to the main title, and this is where the letters are attracted to one another. Note that a 3D effect has been implemented to make the main title appear slightly in the distance. The viewer’s eyes acknowledge this and then move immediately to the subtitle: “The Secret Is In Your Mind.” Notice how the subtitle words are perceptively much closer to the viewer than the main title. When the eyes travel from the title to the subtitle, the effect is that of the subtitle coming closer, because it is positioned closer to the viewer–as though the subtitle is ATTRACTED to the viewer. This second effect also engages the reader subconsciously, and it does so in a way that is relevant to the topic of the book.

For quality book design services, and other publishing and editorial services, contact us at: www.JuggernautPress.com
or

www.BetterCovers.com

Consider the following design, and the basic branding elements it contains (from a recent BetterCovers.com project, client website still under construction, we will update link when available).

The basic elements of this design should be present in the interior of the eBook. Now consider a few pages from the eBook interior:

(click picture to enlarge)

The font and design colors, and the basic design elements, are present in the interior of the eBook. They are not overpowering and only present enough to convey the same look and feel.

Many eBook designers do little or no design, and the result is a flat, boring presentation. I suspect they are only interested in getting the money from the client and moving on. Remember, your client may be relying on this product, and the success of the product may determine the success of the client. If you want repeat business, you need to go the extra mile and create a high quality product. If you fail to do so, your client may not be there for the next project.

We have completed hundreds of projects, and we know that spending the extra time and effort will pay off in the log run. So spend however many hours you need to ensure that your eBook product is of utmost quality, and the interior reflects the same branding as the exterior.

www.BetterCovers.com

What story does it tell you?

To understand the overall story it projects, consider the visual messages or symbols included in the design. First of all, we have a female figure in a seductive pose. Next we have an open doorway. We also have a heart, and a rainbow.

The female is also a shadow, which is hidden. This projects the idea of the title word “hidden.” The doorway is a symbol of new beginnings and passage to a new world of information. The heart is the everlasting symbol of love and sex.

The rainbow symbolizes something benefited–a pot of gold found at the end of the rainbow. Rainbows are also elusive as anyone knows who has ever tried to follow one. They move with the angle of light, and this is sort of like a pick-up artist chasing a woman. In this case, the rainbow is FIXED on the cover of the book, implying that all the potential reader needs to do is purchase the book and they get the gold at the end of this rainbow.

Visit us at www.Bettercovers.com

For most of your readers, the image of your book cover will be their first impression. They will not read a paragraph, they will not read a chapter. They will either see your book on a bookstore shelf or see a picture of it in your physical marketing materials or online.

All the more reason to get a good quality book design to help your readers visualize your product—to make a better first impression.

And you don’t need to spend a fortune to get a good quality book cover these days. The Internet, and technology, has changed all of that. All you need to do is shop around some.

We spent time comparing the different prices of book cover design firms and interestingly, most of them charge at least $500 for a book cover design. For example, Createspace.com (owned by Amazon) charges $499 for a unique cover design. If you provide your own picture, they will do it for $299. Their other options for cover design are $999 and $1,499.

Why is cover design so costly? Much of the blame falls on the overhead associated with operating a corporation like Createspace. They have taxes and healthcare benefits and other employee costs to pay along with management expenses and all that other corporate overhead stuff.

Even if you go elsewhere, the prices run around $500 because most of those places are farming the work out to graphic designers after taking a cut of the profits. Another reason is that book cover design is a form of art and it is not easy to just throw together a design quickly. It takes hours, sometimes days.

How does BetterCovers.com offer this service so cheap?

First of all, we are fortunate to have in-house designers and no corporate overhead. Our designers work on exactly one book cover design every day and that is the only thing.

Second, most of our projects are larger ghostwriting projects, and the low-cost cover design is provided as an added value to our other bookmaking services. Cover-only projects are fit between the larger jobs.

Visit BetterCovers.com for samples and pricing.

The answer might be because you may not know of any other ways. If so, I am going to show you one of the many ways you can do it.

Set Up a PayPal Buy Button
You can set up an account on PayPal in only a few minutes (if you don’t already have one). After you have a PayPal account, you can generate a Buy Button with the correct price of your product, and you can place this button on your website next to your product. PayPal even offers a shopping cart feature you can use for multiple products.

The advantage of this method is this: you can do it very simply and quickly. If you have ever researched shopping carts, then you know how complex they are and how many hoops–electronic, physical, and monetary–you need to jump through to get it done.

Online shopping carts require term agreements and all sorts of other messy things. It can get to be a really real quagmire when you try to compare all the different shopping carts given all the different features. You will also encounter a more complicated issue with interfacing the shopping cart to your site. You need a more complex (and costly) relationship with a web programmer for one.

It goes on and on, but when the rubber hits the road, it all comes down to this:

Most, if not all, new Internet Entrepreneurs have little or no understanding of how their product is going to perform online, so why spend a gazillion dollars setting up a monolithic shopping cart system just to find out?

The disadvantage of PayPalling it is that you are making “pals” (in the financial sense) with PayPal, and maybe you don’t want to do this. Because they are not regulated like normal financial institutions are, PayPal can cause serious problems for your business and you may have no recourse other than to close your (online) doors. PayPal dodged all of that regulation stuff (for the most part) because Internet Commerce evolved so quickly that the regulators could not put the normal regulatory “stranglehold” on them (sort of like Microsoft in the computer business). PayPal got huge before anyone in the regulatory world realized it. Now they are literally the “King Kong” in the online transaction world.

Since PayPal has no regulatory oversight, they can shut your business down in a mouse-click. Suppose a terrorist in Klackistan buys a product from you and PayPal decides to investigate you for money laundering; during the investigation, you have to declare bankruptcy because PayPal has frozen your account and you have no cash flow. If you believe the many accounts posted on the Internet, such things have happened.

If King Kong has a fit, rightfully or wrongfully, you can get smashed.

No questions asked (actually, you might ask them, but–unlike with a bank–no one has to answer).

Anyways, back to your PayPal buy button. If you don’t mind being pals with a big money monkey, you can set up a quick and easy PayPal button, and you are in business. I know of about 5-10 other ways to sell and distribute products online, all with advantages and disadvantages depending upon the nature of your product/business.

For now, a PayPal buy button is the quickest and easiest.

www.juggernautpress.com
www.bettercovers.com

This is simply because the target audiences are usually different. Based on our results (with the conversion rates on more than a hundred book projects), the Internet prospect usually responds better to graphics that are more colorful and have more flashy design effects—graphics techniques like embossing and gradients and strokes. When designing for the Internet prospect, you should create a design that comes alive and explodes out of the screen. You want to infuse it with elements that “shimmer” or move (think optical illusions). You want the book cover design to grab attention.

Since you are using a display screen to present your product, you can embellish with colors and lots of shimmer to grab attention.

Conversely, when designing a book cover for a more conservative prospect, possibly a C-level business executive, you need to give the overall cover a more conservative look and feel. Usually, these more conservative prospects are put off by flashy colors and infomercial-like presentations. They are more impressed by a book cover that looks more like a textbook. Avoid flashy graphics and limit your colors to three or maybe four at the most. You should use big conservative text and spaces filled with flat color.

If you follow these basic cover design guidelines, your conversion rate will be higher; we know this from experience.

www.BetterCovers.com

To research other book cover designs, you can go to the local bookstore or search online. I have found that searching online is the most effective. This review of cover designs will give you a good idea of the other design concepts being used to express the contents of similar titles. You can also gather entirely new ideas that you possibly did not even consider.

To reflect the core essence of the contents of your book, you will either need to read the book yourself or study the table of contents. If you do not read the book, you can look at each item in the table of contents. If the book is written well, and it is nonfiction (fiction books don’t generally have chapters and if they do, the chapter titles often do not reflect as much as with a nonfiction book), you may be able to surmise the material from the table of contents entry. For each chapter/section, if you cannot determine the nature of the content from the chapter title, you will need to read enough of that chapter to determine what is being covered. After you have parsed through every chapter/section, you will have established an adequate understanding of the book’s contents.

After researching similar titles and studying the contents of the book, you are ready to design the book cover. If you have a book title, start by entering the title name on the page of whatever software program you are using to design the cover. You then need to compliment it with a photograph or a custom graphic design. This is where your skill as a graphic designer comes into play. I have a college degree in graphic design, and I have completed over 250 book cover designs, so I am very familiar with the process, but I can tell you that there is usually some level of uncertainty and anxiety with each book cover since it takes a few hours before things start to come together.

My recommendation is that you get some training in graphic design techniques because usually, the quality of the book cover is a function of the amount of design that goes in. If you just have a photograph and white title text for example, the end result will look amateurish and simple. If you spend some time to merge the title lettering with the photograph/design and add some borders and graphical effects (drop shadows, strokes, embossing, etc.), the quality of the book cover will increase.

www.BetterCovers.com

Book projects utilize varying levels of marketing, online and off. Some projects simply list their title for sale on Amazon and leave it at that; others perform every conceivable type of marketing possible, including sales/landing page promotions, autoresponder campaigns, list marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO web copy, website promotions, blog postings, email blasts, backlink building, clickbank listings, article marketing, social bookmarking, etc.

Many variables exist in every book project, the targeted audience, the marketing approach, but the single most important—and consistent—element in a book project is the book cover.

The old adage goes, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” but in fact everyone does.

EVERYONE judges a book by the quality of its book cover.

When it comes to marketing (either online or off), a disheveled, sad-looking book cover almost always signals that the interior is also substandard. The very success of a book is dependent on how it is presented, so it is imperative that you expend the effort and resources necessary to create a professional, top-quality book cover for your book.

www.BetterCovers.com