speaker 0:   0:00
design Oh, book cover that sells on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by digit save money without thinking about it. Get paid $5 just for signing up at serve. No master dot com Backslash digit today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. 99% of independent authors, independent podcasters. People like us when we create our first product. I see this with direct marketing Internet marketing products. I see this with most of my competitors with their podcast cover, and I seed on nearly every single book cover over and over again. And it's at the point where I just have to say something. Most people have covers that air so terrible, the hurting, their business there, so amateurish and it's a well known problem. I I was listening for the first time ever to a podcast by other authors a few days ago, and it was one of the first things they started talking about, how they couldn't understand, and I couldn't believe it. But no matter what they say and what they do, people just continue to put terrible covers on their books. And I'm gonna try in today's special episode together in our special time together to help you understand the elements of a great cover. Whatever direction you take your business, understanding design a little bit is important. This will become important as you design your website if you decide to do a podcast, if you decide to sell products and website there, some key elements and other people have different philosophies. But I want to give you a very simple one very simple set of rules that if you follow them, we'll put you on the path to good cover. 99% of the buying decisions made based on the cover of your Kindle book on your Amazon book. When people search to Amazon, if they see anything about your cover, they don't like, don't trust don't respect. Don't connect with I. They'll move on. You'll lose the sale. The covers where they look click on the cover to then see the rest of your book description. They don't see reviews until they've chosen the cover. They don't see your description until they've seen the cover. They don't see any of the other information. All they see is cover book title author name A week cover is the number one reason books fail, and the same principles apply to creating podcast covers, creating book covers on your direct website. Whether doing three D block shots, however you're doing it. I like to have a really simple set up because I find that most people can handle that. I like text image tax from top to bottom. Very simple. We want to look at the reader's experience. Most people design a cover based on something they like, and I can look at most covers and tell you a lot about the person who designed it. When I see a bad cover, I can usually tell you the gender and race of the person who designed the cover. For some reason, people do bad covers in a certain way, and I can immediately tell a lot about the person who wrote the book who made the cover themselves. Now there are plenty of people who pay a lot of money for bad covers. Usually, if you pay a couple 100 bucks for Carvel, you'll get a cover that looks professional and doesn't sell. At least it'll look okay, But if you get a cheap cover, if you do it yourself, it will look like garbage. The first step to designing your cover, your podcast image, your box shots, whatever your creative ist. Whatever your creative element, the presentation. Start by looking your competition. Be honest with yourself and be honest about your industry. If you decide I don't care what other people are doing, I'm just gonna do what I like. Your book will fail if your approach to business approach to this business any of the things I'm covering is you're going to do what you want. It doesn't matter. Other people D'oh, you don't care what the rest of market is doing. You're gonna do your own thing. You'll fail and there's nothing I could do to help you. You've made an active decision to hurt your business, and there's no way I could help someone who's actively hurting their own business. Pride and ego are business destroyers. I have a friend that I mentioned this before has a $500 cover on his book. The book does not sell. If he changed that cover, the sales would double the reason This is on my mind. There's a couple of reasons covers have really come up for me lately. I'm doing more and more paid advertising. And in fact, I've been going through a brand new, really extensive author Facebook ads training. So it's all about running paid advertising as an author, and I've been run paying advertising for the last month on another platform and with all my paid advertising. One of the walls I run into is with my series of romance books. My romance cover Very simple design. I looked at the top book in my space When my book came out. I looked in a very popular book. I looked at the colors on the cover. I looked at the design of the cover and I looked at the image. So the cover of my romance novel is a very muscular torso. There's no face. There's no legs. It's It's a really buff guy I found on a stock image site, and I spent ages finding the perfect body. Eyes probably spent two or three hours before I shows the picture that I wanted to use, so that covers perfect in that space. What I've discovered is that advertising platforms won't allow you to have a cover that's too steamy or too suggestive. Here's why. When you buy ads on Facebook and most other platforms, you can't control the age of the people who see your ad perfectly. Now Facebook does let you target demographics and say, Oh, I only want people 18 it up to see this. It doesn't matter how many times have kids used their Facebook parents. Facebook account of kids use their parents Facebook account Kid's been searching around, or you accidentally use someone else's Facebook account. Your house. My girlfriend used my computer. I don't notice it, and I sit down and click on Facebook. It takes me a second to realize what's going on. So Facebook doesn't want to deal with a kid seeing a sexually suggestive romance book cover so they won't allow you to run ads with that type of cover. That's one thing I've run into, so I'm in the process of creating a new cover for the group box shot. I actually want to run traffic owner and adds not to the first book in my 10 books. Serious put into the collection of all 10 books together, so I need to create a new cover that's acceptable with this new set of guidelines. So have the initial guidelines of I need a really sexy cover of a sexy man with nice big muscles and big abs. But the second set of guidelines I wanna be able to run pay traffic so I have to make a shift. These the two overarching principles that should drive you now outside of romance. You don't really have to think about advertising guidelines because anything will be acceptable if it's acceptable in your space will be acceptable there. Only with romance covers. You have the secondary thought. I have a book right now where the cover's not very good. I wrote a book a year and 1/2 ago year ago. Call about introversion. It's called Quiet. The power of introverts in a loud world something like that. It's similar to another book called Quiet. The cover I chose is Bright Red, which is good for drawing attention. But there's something about the imagery. There's a woman on the cover kind of making a noise. Ah, be quiet noise with her finger and the book doesn't sell very well. I've known I needed to change the cover for ages. I just haven't done it. I finally started the process last weeks. I've been going through and redoing the ton of covers this month. The cover doesn't work because of the picture. The red is too much of a stop color, this particular shade of red and the woman's face. It doesn't quite fit the feeling of the book. What you want to suggest is like a quiet little secret. So the real cover I would want is like a cheeky smile or something like that. I'm changing the image, and I'll have the new covered limits week. In fact, I just got the new cover design, the first design done, so when you're designing your cover, we have title image and then author name below it, and you can switch off the name and title Have author name of the top tight at the bottom if you want if you're a more well known author. But if you're not famous that spending into title at the top the first thing to think about his colors your cover should only have four colors. Black, white, dark and light color. You want hi color contrasts. This means colors that are very different. You don't wanna have dark blue and very dark blue is your two main colors. Sometimes he will have a cover that looks amazing. So nice and dark. But the colors are very similar, and when you look at the image in black and white, it doesn't work anymore. Amazon cells at least half the books in black and white. So if your book on Lee looks good in color but doesn't look good in black and white, you have a problem if you look at the cover of breaking orbit. The original design, the first designed I had looked amazing in color, but in black and white it wasn't as good, so I actually have a cover that looks okay and color. It's even better in black and white. I made a change to make it fit. So remember the way your audience buys. We want to have high contrast ratio with our colors so that in color and in black and white, your product will look amazing. You'll notice that I use certain colors on all of my cover's. There's certain colors I love to use electric, purple, electric blue, really bright colors. This area, very warm oranges draw a lot of attention to the eye. So go into your category. Look at the top 10 books there, and then see how you can be 90% the same as step one. You want to be just like the other books as much as you can so that your book makes sense. If you're in a category and they're 10 best sellers, all 10 best sellers have a picture of an astronaut or spacesuit on the front. You need to have an asteroid on the cover of your book. Don't try and reinvent the wheel. I see it so often where people cheap out too far on the cover on the cheap, out on the image. Your image is gonna cost you 3 to $5 then the cover design will be another 3 to $5 if you can't afford to invest $10 in the cover of your book. When you launch your book and you make your 1st $10 you have to spend that money on getting a better cover or you will never do well. There are certain colors that you should never use on your cover. One of them is neon yellow, another one's neon green. Anything neon is really, really bad. And if you don't know the difference being electric purple and neon purple because this is a podcast and audio only go to Google and type in the two different terms. There's no excuse. Go to any search engine and type in electric purple and then type in neon. Purple neon colors or bad electric colors are good. Electric colors pop out from the page, but they also look good in black and white. Neon colors look like garbage. Every time I've seen the angry on the cover, I know it's an independent author and that there book will fail. There's no other way about it. I see it all the time. I'm in a ton of Facebook groups where people show each other there covers and church under the new books to get opinions, and I can immediately tell us. Soon as I see a post, I could look at the cover, got note. That book's not gonna do well, and neon is one of the big giveaways. People don't understand when I say Get attention to your book. It does mean make a cover that sticks out, but it does not mean using the young color. It also does not mean use seven or eight different colors. So begins to look like a kaleidoscope. If you have too many prominent colors, when you go to black and white, it'll just look great. It'll look too messy. Always check your cover in black and white and with your imagery design. Look at what the people around you were doing. This will give you a feel, and it's better to have really average cover that totally fits your space and totally looks professional than to have a cover that really stands out because it doesn't make sense. The image itself needs to connect with the topic if the images to different if the idea is too much of a disconnect or too much of a joke. You'll lose the audience. And when I say too much of a joke, sometimes we want to go a few steps beyond the idea. Last night I was working on an image for product about memory. I am improving your memory and I couldn't find a really good picture of a brain. So then I thought a what about just a picture of a Ram chip? This is just for something internal. This is for one of my product blueprints that I'll begin releasing next week to help people launch different types of products, work in different types of small projects. I began to do that, and then I wanted to go down the path, and I thought I wouldn't it be funny to have a picture of someone into computer store selling different parts and looks like you're going into upgrade your computer. Then I remembered Wait, that's too far. It's too many steps in the joke, so people won't all get it. 90% of people might get it, but if 10% of people don't get, I lose 10% of my sales. Understanding your audience understanding how they buy things is very important I know that not everyone would get a joke like that. It's too far. Even the Ram chip is almost too far. I just really couldn't find a good picture that represented memory, and I looked for quite a while. I might look again today and change it, but we want her image to fit with breaking orbit. Something very similar happened. And if you read that book when it comes out, I talked extensively about book covers, and they're breaking over is my entire book launch plan. That's why books are my mind again. The cover for that book. I almost put Asteroid on the cover. I saw all the other books that do well in the space of pure text covers, or they have a spaceship. It looks like a pencil. Those are the two things you see. I didn't have a spaceship pencil, but I like the idea of space. So I get the idea for the cover breaking orbit and one of the images. One of my final three images was an astronaut with an electric purple background, A beautiful image, really beautiful image flying towards you. The problems with this image is number one. He's flying towards you and number two, he's not moving up. There's no feeling of him breaking orbit. I also looked at some pictures of asteroids and other planets, the asteroids kind of expense bed, and I realized none of those are gonna work. But the astronaut one with electric purple background because it was a bright color I liked that drew a lot of my attention. Only the final decision did I say, You know what? This cover, it's the symbol. The image doesn't make enough sense to people. Will people see a patriot? Astra. I understand breaking orbit and then think it's a book about writing books but can don't know. People would see that and think it's a secret of that book, The Martian. They think it's a science fiction book, so your imagery can make people think your books about a different topic. Color is important, but so is subject matter. Whatever category, you're in your cover. Should batch. Your cover image should make sense. Keep that in mind as you make a decision. I see everyone in romance has either a topless guy, a man and a woman or a guy in a suit like a nice scene. A tuxedo. You can't see his face. Those are the really common images, so people can still take that subject matter and get it wrong. You have to really think about the person on the cover when you're using a person using a stock photo and make sure the way they're standing together. Fitz, make sure they're positioning. Fits in general with romance. You don't want to show the person's face on the cover so that the person reading the book could imagine it's them. So if I see a romance cover and I can see the guy's face, it's a high risk decision now. You can do it if you do it right. This is in the area where someone is very good. It covers can get away with having the face. But if you're just starting out, don't do it. It's an advanced move that you have to be advanced to accomplish. So when you're copying other people, sometimes it's better to copy the middle of the road because it's easier to get right. This is a very creative process, and I can't give you perfect advice. I can give you really good guidelines to follow as you're beginning. Follow my coloration. Ideas. Make sure you check for black and white. Now the process of getting cover designed is very simple. I go through three phases. Once I've decided on my cover. The first phase is to pick the image. So I picked the image and one on the cover. So right now I'm replacing the cover for quiet. You were pacing the cover for my introvert. So last week I was looking for an image that was better, I found by looking for pictures of spies. I found a picture of a woman spy, kind of whispering with a finger over her mouth. But like she looks like a spine, she looks like Be quiet because I've got a really awesome secret, as opposed to be quiet because I'm nervous. And that's what I want my cover to express the positive aspect of quiet. So I found this image, but the colors on it stay. The colors were okay. Most vector images and most drawings that you can buy online from stock image sites, and I'll give you a link to a couple of stopping image sites I use in the show notes. They're in pastels. I hate it. But for some reason, all these designs always pastel. The reason they do that is passed out. Colors are inoffensive, and most people will buy them. Most people prefer that for their boring business. Websites and pastels are fine for internal stuff. But when you want to make a cover that pop when you want your cover, stand out from the crowd, you want bright. So I grabbed that cover. In this second step, I want to have the subject is color. So then hired a designer on fiber who's done work for me in the past. It's actually the same person who do this for me, was serving Master the book and I said, Fix these colors. This image stinks. The drawing is great, but the colors do not pop. And so now the spy is where bright purple, and there's a bright pink or magenta background, really great magenta. The same agenda that appears and cover serve no master. So now I have an image that has a great subject matter, and then it changed the colors to make a pot. If you use a photograph, it's harder to change the colors. But with factor. Images and drawings changing the colorations. Not too hard. You'll get someone of fiber to do it there, tons of photo shop people. And if you're good at Photoshopped yourself, maybe you could do it yourself. Once I go through the color phase and I only do the coloration phase about one out of 10 books, you don't always have to do it. Some. I can often find a great cover image that has the right colors. It's only once in a while that you need to redo the colors, but that's what I do to get the perfect cover. It's what I've done for two books recently. Once you have that perfect image, then you go fiber and hire one of the designers that I like. You just type in a book cover designer and find one that you like During this process. There are a couple of very, very important things. Number one. Find two books in your category that are selling well. The mistake people make when sending information to the designer is 2.2 books they like every week, coaching student or again email or on one of my webinars someone points me to a book cover that or book that they think is doing really, really well. And they say, I love this book. Look how many reviews it has looked at the school cover. And then I look in the book is selling 1 to 2 copies a month of books making like $7 a month. Check the book ranking for you. Decide if it's doing well. I have seen books with over 1000 reviews that are making no money. Books die If you don't maintain them, don't maintain momentum. That could happen. So go to your category and find two books that are selling really well and making a lot of money. And that's the cover design. That's what you want to model. Your designer is going to model a little bit of how those designs are colored and also the font, which is more important. Anything else? It's very hard for me to describe good and bad funds. I wish that I could. I'm not a typographer fist. Maybe it's called a type ologists. I'm not even sure which is the correct word. But there are book cover fonts that work, and there's only about 10 and there are thousands of book cover funds that look like garbage. Anything cursive on the cover is probably terrible. If you have a cursive style text on the cover of your book, there's a 99% chance you made a horrible mistake. Cursive is hard to read when it gets really small, and very few successful books about the history of all books have had cursive writing on their cover. You'll never see it with a judicially published book. Yes, we are bypassing nutritional publishing route, but we don't want to completely ignore thousands or hundreds of years of research and millions of dollars of marketing research. So I look at really good cover, and I know I want a similar fund. This is why I like to hire someone else to handle the cover to make sure I don't make a fought mistake. If your fund is 99% the same people can field a little bit, and it could hurt your sales much better to just get a professional. And this is why I hire. But cover designers and most of my designer start between five and $20. Some of the prices and fiber of change recently used to all be $5. Again, this is a worthy investment. So at the top end of the range, if you really spend and go hog wild, your cover can cost $30.3 to 5 bucks for the image, $5 to get the color fixed and $20 for really topped the light designer. And usually, if I'm spending $20 I'm hiring three designers, and I'm comparing their work. I usually don't hire someone who's $20 for the one design. It does cost a little money. Thio. Get a great book cover if you designed the cover yourself. Even if you're a graphic designer, your book will probably terrible. It does. It has nothing to dio with photo shop ability, graphics ability. That's not what is. This is this is designing book covers that cell. It's a very specific skill, creativity and being good. A photo shop only five or 10% of it. Now the designers I use if you look at their portfolios, there are a lot of bad covers there, unfortunately, but most of the bad covers their catalogs are because the people requested about cover. I look for that some designers all of their covers about and I can tell it's a bad designer. But some designers they have a few really amazing covers and have tons of bad ones. And I can look at the imagery and see ah lot about the person who ordering the guts of person. Jo's a bad cover person is No, they're doing Person requested a terrible cover, and the designer does what? The person who hired him once. At the end of the day, you're paying so in $5 they're not gonna tell you if you're doing it wrong. They're just gonna take your money and do what you want. They're gonna give you what you want. So you want to show to book similar years and say, these two books were doing really well. I want my cover to look similar to theirs. I usually say Make it similar. There's but a little brighter, a little bit more popping, a little more exciting color. When you follow this pattern, you'll end up with a cover that looks professional as the correct fonts fits into your space and it's bright. Most people's first experience with your cover will be at 1.5 by two inches. That's the size when someone does an Amazon search or goes to the best selling categories. That's the size of the book cover that they see on my Kindle. It's even smaller. I do 92 99% of my book acquiring via my Kindle, not the Amazon website. I see a color. I see the cover for the first time in black and white. In a very small you need to test those things. Some people want tohave three or four really cool images on the cover. But guess what? Can't tell what they are when it gets really small gets all modeled. It's too much information, too small space. Something might look great at six by nine inches, and it will a garbage at 1.5 by two inches Now. I mentioned before that the same principles applied to product block shots and podcasts. I don't want you to think I forgot you most podcasts, designs or garbage. If you look a podcast covers out there on Amazon on iTunes, you'll notice you often can't tell what the podcast is about, and the covers often look amateurs. Black and white is not as important for podcasts, but it's still worth keeping in mind. It's always worth double checking and your pipe guys cover. You want to think three things? Number one. Can people tell immediately what this podcast is about? Number two. Does this image look good? Really, really small? Number three. Will this image capture attention on the iTunes? Paige. If you go to podcast category iTunes, it'll show you 2030 40 of the shots of the podcast image in a big spread. So you have this great of all these different covers, and you're just scanning through. Well, you're covered. Catch the eye and draw attention. The cover for my podcast when you're listening to I spent ages picking the perfect color. It's a very specific shade of aquamarine blue green and I even know the Hexi Decimal code is 134 e. Five e. I even know that sesame code. It's the only color I note for. I tested a similar variation with electric purple of the same cover, but it sent the wrong message. It drew attention, but it didn't match my messaging. The color came across two female and two. It just didn't seem professional, even though it looks great on my book. Covers. The purple color usually use didn't look right for a podcast cover. I tested a lot of variations, many variations, and in fact, I used three or four different podcast cover designers to get a wide spectrum of options. And one of the designers was terrible thing. The 2nd 1 was terrible, and then the other two did pretty good to the Final two. I began to test different designs. Podcast covers often are either too hard to read or they're too busy. That's most common mistake people she able to see from a distance when it's one inch by one inch, two inches by two inches, really small on the screen, really small, their phone what the podcast is about. If it's a health podcast, it should have a picture of an apple or a stethoscope, something like that to let people know it's medical or healthy. If it's an excess podcast, most of this excess podcasts have a picture of a wait. What a lot of people d'oh! What a lot of new podcast people doing the same thing for new authors. We look at someone really successful. I could easily go and look at the Joe Rogan podcast and designed to do a cover just like Kiss. But guess what? He's famous. I'm not. If you're not famous, don't replicate a famous person. I am a successful but not famous person. So I model people that are doing well, but no knows who they are. People don't listen to a podcast because of my name. People. Is this podcast because of the brand name and because of the topic, Be honest with yourself. You're not famous if you are in your podcast. I'm very flattered, but most likely you're not your regular person just like me. Try make a living just like me. So you cover your image for your podcast. Should be very clear about your topic. It should pop out from the page and it should be readable. Small. I'm in some groups for people who do podcasts. I went through some training in my podcast. People post our covers sometimes, and I've seen where people have a terrible cover Total garbage. I can tell you right away it won't sell all the principles for Kendall covers and Emily covers with same for podcast covers, and I see you cover the chairman. People go, Wow, I love it. That's so great. I don't know what to do because it's making a person feel good. If I say something that you're so mean, it becomes about emotion and ego. And I hate that. If someone tells you they like your cover, they think it looks fun. Their advice is not very valuable. What you want. Our people who look at your cover compared to other covers and say this will sell or this will draw attention or this works in your category. Your cover will never be seen in. Isolation will always be seen with other covers around it, so you have to look at your thing in the crowd. When the police arrest a criminal, they put him in a room with five other people that look like them and then have the witness say which one? It iss. They have to do a lineup without a line up. You can't use the identification in court because it's meaningless, saying that's the criminal when you have nothing to compare it to, is worthless. I love that cover with nothing to compare it to, is garbage. If you want to send your cover two people to test you could do. My friend did this and I was brilliant. He was sending me a test cover. He took a screenshot of his category and Amazon, and then he placed his cover image over the top of one of the competitors. So it was just hidden on the page and said, What do you think? So I looked at it in context. This is a brilliant move and exactly what you should be doing. Have people look, you're covering context? How did her cover look small? How does your cover look? From a distance? My cover looked amazing. Big one of my older designs for pocket cover, but small you couldn't really tell us going on had too much information. My cover has title a picture of me on the side and then three, where tagline below it. Remember correctly, I hope I'm right and I want to so many variations. But in the bottom section, where's that green? There's a band of green and there's nothing there. It's empty space. Originally, I filled that. I tried putting text there. Other images there tested putting a palm tree in the front and book more Island E. And they all made the cover looked worse. They look cool big, and when you made it small, you couldn't tell what's going on. The more than image became cluttered. So when you're designing your product shots, when your design your cover's keep these ideas in mind, look at what other people are doing and be similar once you're very similar, then stand out by being 5 to 10% different, and the 5 to 10% should come from the colors you choose. Choose colors that are bright, that inviting and it fit your space and you'll do really, really well. The cover is the most important part of the entire project. That's why this is one of the longest episodes I've ever recorded, And I didn't even realize till just now that I've gone so far over. But this information is crucial with your product shots with your cover shots with your podcast shots. It's really gonna fact your revenue streams if you make a mistake. As always, and a several people discovered last week, you can email me podcast at serving a master dot com. Since you listen to the podcast and I'll reply. Just last week, three different people emailed me and were shocked when I replied. And I love that I love connecting with people. So if you have a cover, you can post it on my Facebook page. That's the best place to do that so we can get group feedback, whether it's for podcast cover book, cover three D product shot any of those things, and I'll gladly take a look at it if you post one to the page. I then recommending sending a follow up email to me to let me know and I'll draw attention to, and I'll even mention it to other people so more people see it and we can really have some solid feedback for you. But always glad to help people out people to reach out to me, I returned the favor. Thank you so much. Listen, this episode I really hope that you connect with some of this information and realize that designing your cover correctly can lead to massive boost in your revenue. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode we'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for Listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Join me on my Facebook page at facebook dot com Backslash serve no master.