Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Judging a Book by its Cover

We all say we don't, but I have a sneaking suspicion we're not being completely honest. How do I know this? Personal experience. Of all my self-published books (seven in total), one has outsold the others by at least a five-to-one margin. The reason? In my humble opinion, it's the book cover. Consider this.
Sales for Employee Relations were slogging along at a moderate pace with the original cover I'd made for it, which was the very first cover I'd attempted after taking Photoshop classes at my local library. I played with the design and came up with a much more professional looking cover than the original, so I switched the covers out and voila! My sales skyrocketed.


So, I was looking at my sales numbers recently and was wondering why one of my other IR romances, Fading Star, was lagging behind the others. I decided a change up was in order. I removed the cover and made one that had a whole bunch more sex appeal, and guess what? Sales followed. But you be the judge. Does a better, sexier cover entice you more to one book than another? To satisfy your curiosity, I've posted both covers.

***Note: Sales figures didn't change overnight. It took a couple weeks to see the difference the new covers made***

1 comment:

Geoff said...

The first cover of Fading Star is bland but the new cover would make me buy it in a minute. So yeah, a hot cover sells books!

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