If you take a stroll through the Kindle marketplace, you begin to notice something in the paid bestseller list. The further away you get from the top spot, the more amateurish the covers begin to look in some cases.
A Kindle cover may seem insignificant to you – after all, it’s not sheltering the pages of a print book, so who cares what the digital cover looks like? Unfortunately, many people do – and you could lose many sales by overlooking this one feature.
A Kindle Cover that looks like a do it yourself job often makes potential customers think your content lacks expertise, too. You won’t be able to convince them with a “look inside this book” because you’ll never even get the initial click through from the search results on Amazon that takes them to your book’s page.
The book has to look like it could easily be positioned in a Barnes and Noble bookstore front and center. It has to have the right color pattern and depth for your image and text contrasts.
A Kindle cover is just an image that gets uploaded with your book file. Kindle shows a thumbnail version of it in their listings and it gets shown again whenever someone downloads your file to their Kindle.
There are two ways you can attack the task of creating a Kindle cover – the do it yourself route, or by hiring a professional. It’s usually better to hire a professional with experience, unless you have ample graphic design skills yourself.
A Kindle cover costs around $40-50 if you buy it from a professional. If you take the do it yourself route, you can use a tool like Photoshop and add an image that you buy from a stock photo company and add the title of your book and the author name you want to use.
If you hire a professional, ask to see a portfolio of their work in whatever type of book you’re pursuing – fiction or non fiction. How do the covers affect you personally? Do they look like a simple plug in software tool did it, or do they look like they took a lot of time and effort?
Your Kindle cover should have an image that reflects the tone and genre of the story. In some cases, it may have no image at all. The text and image combined has to be laid out well, so that the cover doesn’t look too busy and crammed.
Remember, the cover has to look good as a thumbnail in addition to larger sizes. If you can’t read the text when it’s in thumbnail size, then you need to rework it until it’s viable for use on your publication.