In my last post, I gave you a peek of the cover I’d designed for SmoothieJune: reviews, recipes, and reflections on a month of smoothies. Even though I like it overall, I’m not completely sold on it as a final design.
I had a peek at my competition — bestselling smoothie books — and there’s two dominant colors among the bestsellers: spring greens and deep pink hues. The good news is there is not a single smiling face to be seen, so my general design is sound.
The question is, do I pick one of my pink smoothies and try to blend in (pardon the pun!) or tweak my current cover and stand out? I certainly had a number of bright smoothies that I’ve already photographed but I wonder if I need to make a fresh one and pose it specifically for the cover? I made a nice blueberry-green smoothie the other day and took some photos out in the sun; I may see if one of those will work better than the muted Chai Smoothie photo I’d chosen already.
I also read a great article on designing covers — Shawn and I already knew the tips listed in The Five Secrets to a Killer Ebook Cover, but Karen Eckstein presents them well at the Future of Ink. I also found an article by Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn about changing her cover after she’d already published her book. I’ve always been hesitant about doing that because of all the marketing and branding that one has to tie into things — but for her, it had a positive impact on sales, so it’s worth noting that I don’t have to stick with the cover I design if it turns out not to be working. Check out Book Marketing: On Changing Book Covers to see her justification for the change and the process she went through. It’s worth reading the comments on this one too.
I found both articles as I slid down the rabbit hole of the Digital Publishing group on Google+. I was hoping to find feedback on how best to manage the images inside my book but got distracted by the many other useful articles and discussions.
I’m still a few of weeks out from my ideal publication date, and maybe a week to make a decision on the cover so I can send out my early-reader copies.
The other way you could do it is with some good ol’ A/B testing – put two out there (different links for each) and see which one people pick!
Yup. That’s a possibility too.