EBook Covers – Design Tips to Choose Background, Colors, and Images for eBook covers
Design Tips for eBook covers to Boosts Sales of your eBook
What are eBook covers? These are the wraps for the 3D images of your eBooks. The eBook covers make digital books appear as real books. As readers can’t touch and feel an eBook, its cover is the only way that connects them with the book.
EBook covers are the paths that can lead buyers to your eBook digital checkout counter. Treat the covers as a marketing tool. If the covers have a poor appeal, your eBook venture can take a nose dive. This can be true, no matter the good quality of your content. To ensure the success of your eBooks, wrap them with beautiful eBook covers. Choose the background, colors, fonts, text, illustrations and photos for the eBook covers that create a visual impact.
Here are some tips on how to design eBook covers:
Analyze the profile of your audience: Before you pick the nuts and bolts for your eBook cover, get a good handle on the traits of your buyers. What is their age group? Are they college graduates? Do they have a liberal or conservative outlook? The answers to such and other questions that throw the light on your buyers’ characteristics give a strong foundation for the design of your eBook covers. The knowledge of your buyers also helps you decide on a traditional or a contemporary design.
Background: Create a background collage with photographs that sync well with your content. Set the art opacity to a value that gives focus to the foreground elements. Solid blocks of colors or color gradients is another option for the background. Use an illustration, if it best meets your needs.
Colors: Select professional colors for the background and the foreground items. These include the title, tag line, key points and others. The profile of the readers of your eBooks should also drive the choice of colors. Make sure the colors for the foreground and background are distinct. Such a design technique makes the text legible.
Graphics: Photographs, illustrations and clip-art are the backbone of the design of your eBook covers. Graphics have the power to attract readers and impact them in an emotional way. Use photographs also to reduce the text content.
What are the guidelines to use graphics? It includes: 1. Use photographs or other art that have a good match with the theme of your eBook. Otherwise, graphics will distract users. It means lost opportunities for sales. 2. Do not use larger size graphics. This applies particularly to photos. Why? It’s because the larger size photos take more time to download. 3. Optimize the graphics for web display. You can accomplish this task with software like Photoshop.
Image Credit: <em>sxc.hu/veke</em>
Why the Fonts and Title and Tagline Matter in the Design of eBook Covers?
Fonts: Select fonts for your title, sub-title, tag line and key points that add flair to your design. Limit the types you use to two or three. Remember, the text display with many fonts can have an adverse impact on the design.
IMPORTANT: Limit the use of text to title and other eBook cover items for which you must use text. Further, do not crowd the design with too many words, because information overload can cause fatigue to the mind. It means a higher potential for the buyers to lose interest in your eBook.
Title: It says what your eBook is all about. So, take time to formulate a powerful title that unlocks the value of your book.
How do you write a title? First, create at least six to ten short titles. Each of these should range between four to six words. Second, compare the titles. Third, pick the one that best conveys the central idea of your works.
What if you exceed the word limit by, say by two to three words? Split the title. Example: Say you’ve an eBook on yoga with the title Guide to Learning Yoga in Three Days. Split the title into two lines. The first line can have the first three words and the second the rest of the text.
Tagline: It has the potential to motivate the readers to buy your eBook. As with the title, keep the tagline short. Make sure the tagline captures the benefit or theme of your book and aids recall.
Software to Design eBook Covers
Software to Create eBook Covers: Use a full-fledge image editing software like Photoshop to design your digital wrapper. If you don’t have Photoshop, checkout a free graphics program like GIMP.
EBook authors who want to design their eBook covers faster use software exclusive for this purpose. Some of such software works as a plug-in for Photoshop. Cover Action Pro is an example of the program that falls in that category. It has a number of Photoshop actions that makes it a snap for you to create professional eBook covers in minutes.
