by Crymsyn Hart
One of the most important things for marketing a book is the cover. I particularly love what’s between the book jacket, but the first thing a reader sees is the picture on the front cover. Hopefully that cover can give you some idea of what you might be getting yourself into. Then again, a person might read a book, look at the cover and wonder what in the world had they read. I’ve done that a few times. I’ve grabbed a book that looked like something I had wanted to read and the blurb was pretty good, but after reading the book it had nothing to do with the cover. I’m sure that everyone’s done that.
One thing about working mostly with small e-publishers, I am lucky I can browse the various stock art sites and choose who or what I would like to be on the cover. I recently had a conversation with one of my cover artists. She did a wonderful cover for me, but I needed the model added to the cover to show it was an Interracial Romance. She countered that it would be shown as an IR from the blurb and the page it was one. However, my response was that I look at covers first before I read the blurbs especially when shopping online. I’m sure there are others who do the same thing. But it’s nice to have an input. I spend hours looking over different models who I think are a good representation of what my characters look like. Then that goes to the cover artist and they perform miracles with the stock art.
Many people don’t realize that e-books do have covers. But they do, and like their print counterparts, they turn people on or off.
What do you think about covers? Do you judge a book by it?
