Make a Good First Impression with your Book Cover

Everlasting Wisdom

Your book cover is the first impression you offer to your potential buyer and it is a large part of the image that you want to create, especially if you want the reader to potentially become a client for your services or products. You will want to make sure that the book cover as well as your book layout will match the overall brand that you are building for yourself and or your company. Not that you want your book cover to look like it is obviously a perfect match for your other branding material but that it simply matches in color tone, theme, fonts and appearance.

Unless you are highly skilled in this area you will need to find a good designer who has experience in designing book covers. Once you have located 3-4 experienced book cover designers, get samples of their work to review. You may find one whose design style seems to be in line with the vision you have of your book cover and your brand. Choose the book cover designer that has created the most eye catching covers. I say “created” because what you want is someone who is capable of creating a book cover from scratch. Stay away from designers that use templates, you want your book cover to be absolutely unique to you and your book.

Understand the Technicalities of your book cover

Your book cover is obviously more technical than the average brochure, with bleed, ISBN #’s and specific delivery requirements of printers for the finished files it can get tricky. So make sure your book cover designer is qualified so you don’t spend time and money that is not necessary. Also put them in touch with your printer whenever possible so they can get the exact technical information that they need in order to get it right the first time they send the book cover file to the printer. There is not much that is more frustrating than being ready to launch your book marketing campaign or being ready for an upcoming interview, appearance or presentation and then having a delay on your printing because of a small simple thing that could have been avoided.

ISBN #’s and other technical “stuff” for your book cover

ISBN stands for “International Standard Book Number” and it consists of a 13-digit number that uniquely identifies your book. The purpose is to identify your title from any other title and is specific to your publisher as well. It is used heavily and results in more efficient marketing and cataloging to and from >publishers, retailers and distributors.

The ISBN is a must and you will need one if you want to be taken seriously. In fact the bar code that you see on the back of book covers is derived using the ISBN# for your book and is used to communicate your book’s title and information to computer software and tracking systems. When is the last time you saw a bookstore of any size not using a barcode scanner?

The ISBN is broken down in five parts.

1) The first three digits identify that it is an ISBN;
2) Identifies a country or group of countries;
3) Identifies a particular publisher within a geographic group;
4) Identifies a particular title or edition of a title;
5) A single digit at the end acts as a “check digit” to validate the ISBN.

So, unless you are going to self publish and only offer your book to friends, family and the occasional interested party then you MUST have an ISBN# on your book cover.