Judging My Book By It’s Cover

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I wrote in my last post about how I joined a free books giveaway. It’s a promotion where writers get together and offer readers free copies of their books, or (like in my case) previews of their books. You’ll find the giveaway here.

I’m really happy with how this has worked out for me. Readers have downloaded previews of my book, and a few of them even signed up for my newsletter – which is awesome. I don’t know if any of them actually read the book, or if they just downloaded it because it was free, but for the time being I’m just happy so many people choose to claim a copy for themselves.

Maybe they’ll read it at some point?

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What I didn’t think about, and didn’t expect, was that I would be able to see how many times the other books in the giveaway had been claimed too – not just mine. In this way, I can see how my book is doing compared to everyone else’s. Specifically, I can compare the strength of my book’s cover and blurb against those of the other books.

When I first logged in on the giveaway page and saw my book among all of the others it struck me how dazzling and impressive all of the other cover images were. I felt like I was way out of my depth with my plain and simple cover I’d made myself from a stock photo I’d bought for ten bucks.

Some of the other authors in the giveaway will have spent a lot more money on their covers.

For the most part they look exactly the way cool, sexy, action packed Fantasy and Science Fiction books are supposed to look. Now, this may sound as if I’m mocking the other covers, but I’m really not. This is what works, and what sells, and what readers expect. Don’t underestimate reader expectations. If I were to mock anything, it’d be the concept of the standard SFF book cover in itself, but that’s a blog post for a different day (and probably for a different blog too).

Basically, what I wanted to say is that I looked at my own cover next to all the others and I felt a bit insufficient, or perhaps jealous. It’s like I was a kid and my toys weren’t as cool as the other kids’ toys, or something like that.

In the end though, it didn’t seem to matter to the people claiming free books from the giveaway. I just did a check on the page and the number of books that have more claims than mine, is slightly lower than the number of books that have less claims than mine. My book is almost smack in the middle of the field, and I really can’t complain about that.

Please note, this isn’t a competition, and this isn’t a call for my friends to go claim my book just to increase the number. That’d just ruin things for me. The satisfaction comes from knowing there are people out there, who don’t know me at all, who have chosen to claim my book based on the cover alone.

Well, there’s also the blurb. It’s a nice enough blurb, but that’s also a topic for another blog post (on this blog).

Finally, I’d like to point out that I have another cover on the way. It’s being painted and designed by a good friend of mine, and I’m really excited about getting to show it off to the world – hopefully next week already.

It’s going to be awesome!

Judging My Book By It’s Cover

2 thoughts on “Judging My Book By It’s Cover

  1. I happen to like your cover. Maybe I’m looking at it more as a piece of art than a promotion, though. I’m trying to write and illustrate my own book, and I’m feeling like I don’t have the promotional knack. Anyway, good luck. I’m going to download your preview.

    1. Thank you. I’m glad you like it.
      I don’t think it’s a bad cover, and I kind of like it too. It’s very symbolic for what the story is about. It just felt like it stood out in a very weird way among all the other ones.
      Best of luck with your own writing and illustrating, and best of luck with the promotion. It’s difficult, but with a bit of practice I think I can make it work – and so can you. :)

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