Tag: sales

Cover me Irresistible

Cover Love, Indie vs Traditional, Inspiration, Kim Koning, Marketing, Publishing
Cover me irresistible

First Impressions Count

In life everything we see makes an impression on us. Both the really good and the really bad stick in our memories. We also make impressions on others. But there is only one first time, there is only one first impression. It is true that if your first impression was not that good, you may have a chance to make a better second impression but the first impression is the one that will also stay in the memory bank.

You wouldn’t go on a first date looking “regular”. You wouldn’t go on an interview looking “average”. You take the time to look your best for “first impressions” in your daily life. You take the time to look your best for “professional first impressions” in your daily life. But often you want to go a step further and look better than all of your competition. You want to look the best in a crowd. You want to stand out from a crowd.

What is the first thing you see when you browse a book store, traditional or online? What makes you stop in front of one book rather than look at the one beside it? What attracts your attention enough for you to pick up the book and read the back blurb? What is your first impression of a book controlled by?

Cover me Irresistible – You had me at first sight

Time and time again I pick up books because of their arresting covers. I might never have heard of the book or the author but if the cover wows me, nine times out of ten I will buy the book. The cover is a book’s greatest first sales tool. It is the packaging of the writer’s project. It is the silver platter that your work is presented on. It can make or break your sales. It can win you new fans and lose you potential readers. Covers are what people buy when you are a new author or an unknown talent. Bookstores will decide on the shelf placing of your book by your cover. Readers will want to know more about your book and pick it up off the shelf if your cover arrests their attention.

Traditional publishing companies pay departments of art and sales people thousands of dollars to make a cover as irresistible as possible in order to make your book a bestseller. Books covers count towards sales. eye-catching covers can make an unknown book a bestseller and bad covers can make well written books difficult to sell.

In Indie publishing – both small press, self-publishing and e-books – covers can make or break a book. Poorly designed covers can make a book look boring, uninteresting, unprofessional and uninviting: all of these points are negatives in selling the product = the book.

So what makes you love a cover? What makes a cover stand out from hundreds or even thousands of similar covers in the same genre? What makes a cover stand out from a crowd of covers?

If there were a golden rule of thumb I am sure many writers would make millions and follow it to the letter. But choosing books is a subjective industry. It is based on personal opinion and personal preference. A cover that i would love might not appeal as much to Jill and a cover that Jill loves might not appeal as much to Joe. There is no “perfect cover” but there are a few key points that the best selling books use for their cover art and cover designs.

  • Colour – Bright colours or dark/bold colours
  • Colour Palette – Not too many colours on one cover and using colours that complement each other
  • Cover Art – Suitable to the genre and must give some sort of “visual blurb” of the story
  • Cover Art – Simple without confusing someone, so pick one main image instead of a complicated and crowded image with so much going on that it is difficult to figure out what you need to focus on
  • Cover Art & White/Black Space – Well spaced design and placement
  • Title – Easily read type font, bold and standing out on the page, should also match the cover art
  • Author’s Name – This should also be easily visible and not disappear into the cover art (Remember, you want the reader to know who wrote the book)

These are some of the top selling covers over the last few years. Let us see if they match all the above points.

Goodreads Best 100 Book Covers 2011

Goodreads Best 100 Book Covers 2010

These are some of my favourite covers that had me enticed…

Stieg Larsen – The Millenium Trilogy
Alice Sebold’s “Lovely Bones”
Andrew Smith “the Marbury Lens”

So tell me which are your favourite covers that have made you pick the book from a hundred others?

Why? What attracts you? What makes a cover irresistible? 

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Publishing your book: Be market savvy. Be reader savvy.

Branding, Kim Koning, Marketing/Networking, Notes on Wrestling The Muse, Publishing
On the platform, reading
Image by moriza via Flickr

This week I have been considering the reader which brings me to consider the writer. Too often as a writer, we tend to underestimate our reader. We do this by adding too much exposition in our dialogue or by explaining feelings. Sometimes you have to give the reader the benefit of the doubt. To be a successful writer you need to remember the skills you have learnt as a reader. (Please tell me that you do read!)

I have spent the last couple of week’s, since the Writers Conference, editing. I have been editing and cutting a lot of my own WIPs. I have also been editing and critiquing my critique partners’ WIPs. To be able to edit, you need to put on your reader’s eyes. As a writer it is so easy to get caught up in the story you are telling. It is too easy to forget, that if publication is your goal, strangers not familiar with your thought processes will be reading your story with the hope of getting caught up in it as well. Since they are not familiar with you as a writer, how will they be judging or critiquing your WIP? They will be judging from their experience as a reader of other writers. In the end, they will be holding up your story in comparison to other stories they have read.

As a fledging writer, you often read and hear, via blogs or direct advice, that you need to know your peers: your market. Does this mean you must copycat other published authors? No. But for anything to be saleable it has to find a market in which to base its pitch.

Think of a bookshop. Is everything just alphabetically arranged like a library? No. The books are arranged by genre and comparative authors/storylines. I love libraries as much as any reader but I do get frustrated when I am just browsing the books without knowing where the genres that I love are placed. If a bookshop were like a library, you would have very few sales in books.

In my day job, I work in sales management. In my daily day-to-day duties, my whole goal is to maximize both the buying experience for a customer as well as maximize my profits by increasing salability. No matter how great a product may be, if it is not marketed correctly – through visual merchandising and advertising – it will not a find an appropriate market for customers. This is particularly true with a brand new product. The customer needs to know what this product is comparative with. Once they have something known to compare the unknown with, you have hooked them much like a fish on a hook.

This brings me back to knowing your peers. Your WIP is finished and is perfectly edited. It is submission time. First you look for an agent. Do you approach any agent? Do you hold a lucky draw for the agent that will love your work? If you submitted your YA fantasy to an agent that specialised in medical thrillers, do you think your bait would take? In all probability, even if the agent is intrigued, the agent will reject your WIP. So how do you know which agent to submit to?

You research. You compare. You do your homework. It is safe to be said that the largest accomplishment of actually finishing your WIP is the hardest part of writing. Suffice to say, the creative end of the process is basically complete but now the business end of the process begins. Your precious WIP that you have spent hours of grueling energy over is now just a “product” in the “shop of publishing“.

Firstly you need to have decided which market you are writing for. Hopefully this thought entered your mind before starting your WIP. So you have decided that your book is going to be the next “Harry Potter” of the publishing world. You need to approach the agent that took on JK Rowling. You will not be approaching John Grisham’s or Danielle Steele’s agent.

You have made a choice on which agent you will be pitching to. Now comes the query letter and the submission. This query letter is your first rung on the sales game. You have to consider that your prospective agent has very little time to waste on reading every submission on the “slush – or unknown writer’s – pile”. So this is your chance to sell your novel. First you have to give them a marketable audience. Tell the agent whose writing you most compare to. Then give the agent a killer sales line that will make them sit up and take notice. In this query letter it is important that you not think like a writer but that you think like a salesman. If you have followed all the rules of submission for the particular agent, you can leave the rest up to them. If they decided that yes, you may have a story that will market to Harry Potter fans but is a different enough story line that it will leave the reader entertained and not bored, you will have hooked your first customer for your book. It is then up to a collaboration between agent and writer to take it to the next level and submit it to a publisher.

Each step of the publishing game from submission to an agent to being accepted for publication is a sales game. It takes market savvy to be able to market and sell your book. You have to realise your prospective reader is going to put down hard-earned dollars to buy your book. Give him something he recognises and then WOW him with something fresh. Think like a reader throughout the entire process of writing your WIP. Are you talking down to the reader? Are you entertaining/boring the reader? Are you antagonizing the reader? Are you leading the reader into a maze in your imagination or are you giving the reader tools to solve this puzzle? Are you giving away too much/not giving away enough of the story? Are you giving the reader the benefit of doubt? Are you respecting the reader?

The reader is ultimately your customer in the business of publishing. Do you want your book to be published and sold? Then respect the reader’s credibility as a customer first and a reader second. After all they have to buy your book before they read it. Writing your book is a creative and personal process. Submitting your book for publication is a marketing game. Publishing your book is a sales game.

Give them something they recognise but give them a new way of looking at a familiar subject. Be market savvy. Be reader savvy.

© All rights reserved Kim Koning

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