Celebrating Independent Authors
One of the biggest and most frustrating challenges authors face is marketing our books.
Part of the reason for this is that we deal with incomplete or misleading data. That means we’re guessing.
We respond to anecdotes. If someone reports great success with KDP select, we try it. If it falls flat for us, we scratch our heads. Continue reading “Missing Data”
Last week, we featured an article which received a lot of attention: Book Cover Basics. This week, author, journalist and artist Shevi Arnold has picked up the baton and is going to smack you with it. Without further ado…Shevi Arnold.
So you’ve written a book, and you’ve decided to indie publish. Great. I’m sure you already know that your book will need a cover.
I was a journalist for 12 years, and for seven of those years I was a newspaper and magazine illustrator and editorial cartoonist. My editors paid me hundreds of dollars to design covers, and I’ve professionally designed close to 100 of them.
What’s that you say? You’d rather do it yourself? Right… Because what would a trained and experienced cover designer know that you don’t? Continue reading “Book Cover Basics Part II by Shevi Arnold”
I’m constantly looking at book covers as part of my “job” here at Indies Unlimited. I run into authors posting their covers in groups all the time, asking for input. So I see a LOT of covers. And most of them all have the same issues.
What I find most ironic is that the same people keep posting book covers with the same problems. I don’t get that. Please allow me to make something perfectly clear. And I’m not just making this up to be difficult or bossy or right. I’m speaking from experience. I enjoy providing my own cover art to my small Indie publisher – and because of that, I’ve taken some lumps. But I’ve also learned some important things about book covers. I share this knowledge freely, to help my fellow Indie authors. Book covers are important. We all want to make a good first impression. Book sales count on it. Continue reading “Judging a Book by Its Cover”