Today I’m reviewing Lois Nicholls “Aussie, Actually.” First impressions: I like it! I like the font and placement, I like the simple white with drop shadow. The subtitle “Landing on foreign soil” is a little light but fine and in the right place. I love the picture and the dogs, and the trail. The only thing I might change is to drop shadow the author’s name, which gets a little lost. So – would I fix it? Probably not… this cover is good enough to keep
(Although, it doesn’t really let me know what the book is about – so the author will need a good description and some good marketing so that people can find the book. Is it a travel memoir? A novel? A little byline adding some clarity would probably help sales, like “a personal memoir of travel, adventure and romance in Australia” or something like that…)
ABOVE: standard cover. BELOW: S. African cover. Actually I think I prefer the colors on the S. African cover – not sure yet about the big “A” in actually. My instinct is that small “a” is better, but maybe that’s just because it’s what I saw first and got used to.
Kindle book cover display problems
The author also mentioned that the book cover doesn’t look right on amazon: in the listing, the kindle book doesn’t look so good, but the paperback does. Maybe this is because amazon used the paperback to generate the kindle? Instead, author’s need to upload their own copy for the kindle cover, which can be done through KDP (kindle direct publishing) or by logging into amazon’s ‘author advantage’ (I think that’s what it’s called).
To test, I uploaded a copy of the cover on the kindle page under ‘customer submitted images’ – it looks fine.
Is your book cover good enough?
A book cover redesign may be a good idea, but you need to measure whether or not it’s ‘good enough’ first. A book cover overhaul may not be what you need to sell more books. If the cover is crisp, clear and conveys emotion, and you can read the text clearly, it’ll probably work. As mentioned it should also clearly position itself in a genre, so that readers know what kind of book it is and what to expect. If it does all that, and most people say they like it, focus your attentions on getting the book in front of people (advertising or networking with related blogs or sites).
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