Last Updated on April 10, 2025 by Tom Kane
Indie authors, don’t blend in! A boring cover won’t sell your book, make your book impossible to overlook.
Once upon a time, I was a little lad at junior school. I remember one lesson very well, when I was about eight or nine. We were issued notebooks. Not the spiral type, but the type that has two staples in the middle and a front and back cover. These notebooks were for us to write What I Did On My Holidays types of stories. Not me, I was a precocious brat. I wrote action adventure and science fiction stories. But that’s not what this little piece is about. It’s about what we learned to do with the front and back covers of our notebooks and our teacher’s reaction to those designs.
The lesson was about covering our books to make them last longer. We learned to cover them in sticky-back plastic. The lesson involved cutting up blue, red, green and other assorted colours of sticky-back plastic. Then we had to cut the plastic into shape and stick it to our notebooks to form a colourful and hard-wearing cover. Finally we had to write our names on the front, which class we were in and then decorate with pretty flowers etc. No, not me. Mine had a red cover with a green alien on the front. A sort of blob with black spots and big black eyes. Yes, dear reader, I was a rebel.
However, I did learn that if you have an eye catching cover, people will take notice. As our teacher walked around the class, she stopped at my desk.
“Young man, that looks awful. What’s it supposed to be?” Mrs. Ford asked.
“An alien, Miss.”
“It’s horrible.”
It may be horrible. But it’s eye catching, and mine was the only one you commented on.
So, what’s the moral of the tale? That’s right, make your book cover eye catching. If you’re an indie author you will probably have to design your own cover or pay to get your cover designed. Either way, make sure it’s eye catching and not bland. It’s the first thing a potential reader is going to see, and you want them to stop and take a closer look.
Copyright © Tom Kane March 2025
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