This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover—Part Two

By Steven Womack

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Hard to believe this is already the ninth installment of This Crazy Writing Life. Thanks for hanging with me on this, and I hope you’re getting something out of my <sometimes> seemingly random observations on the world of writing and publishing.

Last month, we talked about book covers—what a book cover is supposed to accomplish, how it works, and the challenges to getting the kind of cover that will serve the book the best. This month, I’m going to briefly discuss the different types of book covers. This won’t take long, so let’s dive in.

EBook covers are the simplest and quickest covers to create. They’re only one panel (no back cover or flaps), and you’ve got a little wiggle room. No need to sweat hitting the dimensions exactly (but don’t ignore them either). For Kindle eBook covers, you should shoot for a 1.6:1 aspect ratio, which is a complicated way of saying the height of your cover should be 1.6 times the width.

Kindle also specifies that the ideal dimensions for an eBook cover are 2560 pixels in height and a width of 1600 pixels. That gives you the best quality, especially if you’re reading on a high-resolution device. The cover image has to be less than 50 megabytes, and it should be either in a .tiff or .jpeg format. When you upload the image, don’t compress it.

Now if that sounds a little complicated, let’s compare this with a print book cover. Print book covers have a minimum of three different components: a front cover, a back cover, and a spine. This is it for a mass market or trade paperback edition. So how to you create this?

First, you have to know the trim size of your print book. And with modern, print-on-demand technology, you’ve got more choices than ever before. Just noodle around on the IngramSpark or KDP websites (start with the FAQ pages) and you’ll see some of your options. Or visit your local bookstore and marvel at the array of sizes books come in today.

After you get the trim size, then you have to decide on what kind of paper you want your book printed on. As I observed in an earlier installment of This Crazy Writing Life, my personal opinion for a simple novel is to stay away from white paper, which comes in 50- and 70- pound weights. But if you’re printing a book with illustrations, especially color, then you pretty much have to go with white.

Why is this critical? Different papers have different weights and take up different amounts of space. A 300-page book printed on 50-pound Crème is going to be thicker than the same number of pages printed on 38-pound Groundwood.

Oh, and did I mention you have to actually have the book typeset before you start work on the cover? Why is that?

Because the thickness of the book will determine the dimensions of the spine. And that depends on the number of pages in the book and the type of paper you choose.

There are a couple of other considerations that don’t directly affect the size of your cover. A paperback print-on-demand book from Ingram can have either a matte cover or a high gloss cover. Some specialty printers that have come into existence to serve the indie pub community (Book Vault, for instance, which I’ll talk about in a later column) can do even higher-end options like embossed covers, gold leaf lettering, and spray-on marbling. Pretty heady, exotic stuff…

If you’re going for a hardcover, the process gets even more complicated because you now have flap copy.

If this sounds a little overwhelming, just remember: once you have all this data (trim sizes, page count, etc.), then the book manufacturers can feed this into their program and spit out a template. A good cover designer is going to be able to walk you through this without too much agony.

So there’s enough to get you started. Both IngramSpark and KDP have lots and lots of information that’s easily accessible. And like every other task in modern life, you can always search YouTube...

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I wrote last month about how essential a good, inspired, effective cover was to marketing your book. Lots of really good books get passed over because their covers aren’t eye-catching enough, or don’t accomplish what a cover is supposed to do.

Sometimes, though, it works the other way around. As I mentioned in previous columns, my inbox gets inundated several times a day with email pushes marketing books, primarily indie-pubbed books. BookBub, FreeBooksy, BargainBooksy, EReader News, Robin Reads, Hello Books… I get daily visits from them all. And I actually read the emails and scrub down through the book offerings, not because I have time to read all this stuff (who would?) but because I like to just keep an eye on what’s out there. As I’ve also mentioned, even though your crazy Aunt Agnes’s Chihuahua has more graphic design talent in his back paw then I have in my whole brain, I can still tell when a cover works and when it doesn’t.

So imagine my delight when one of these push emails landed in my inbox last week and there’s a cover that quite literally left me speechless. It was gorgeous, beautifully rendered, the colors jumping off the page. It was an homage to those great classic hardboiled paperbacks of the Fifties and Sixties. Square-jawed handsome men in the background, a teary-eyed woman in the foreground, and the front end of a Sixties-era Cadillac off to the side, against a fire-engine red color scheme with brilliant yellow type.

The cover just worked…

Needless to say, though I’m saying it anyway, I downloaded the book immediately. It was an indie-pubbed book, the author’s debut novel. I Googled him and found his website, then wrote him a nice note and told him how much I loved the cover—the blurb on the cover was equally effective—and how much I was looking forward to reading his book.

And by the way, would you be willing to share the name of your cover designer?

The author wrote me back, was happy to share his designer’s name with me. He found him on Fivrr.com and his rates start at twenty bucks for an eBook cover!

As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, Holy Mother Pus Bucket…

Then I sat down to read the book. Now you may have already noticed I haven’t mentioned the title of the novel or the author’s name or even the broad brushstroke plot. There’s a reason for that. I’m too nice a guy to slam another writer’s work, except under the cloak of anonymity (for the unfortunate author, not me). 

But this novel was one of the worst things I’ve ever read in my life. Literally, by the second page I’m shaking my head and asking myself Did I just read that? If KDP offered a purple-ink option, this guy should’ve taken it. Purple prose so overwritten that it dripped off the page. Clearly, this writer never met an adjective or an adverb he didn’t fall in love with. Clichés that were literally on par with heaving bosoms and throbbing…

Whatevers.

I went into the kitchen and read an excerpt to my wife, who broke out laughing. This literally could have been a winning submission for the Bulwer-Lytton contest, except it was a whole damn book.

Which just goes to show, you can have the best cover in the world, the best marketing plans, the best intentions. But if your book sucks, it ain’t gonna work. Rule #1: Write—At The Very Least—A Passably Good Book.

What the hell, I found a good cover designer, though.

See you next month.

Getting Started In Indie Pubbing — Part Two – The First Few Choices

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve decided to take the leap. You’re sick of agents taking six months-to-never to get back to you. The rare legitimate publisher who is willing to read unagented submissions is so inundated with manuscripts that by the time they get around to reading your book, you’ll be deep into your dotage and will have long forgotten you wrote it.

So you’re going to self publish.

Oh, wait… If you read the first installment in this series of columns I’m calling This Crazy Writing Life, you’ll know I despise the term self-publishing. If you need a memory refresher, go back through the Killer Nashville Magazine archives and find that first column.

Then do a reset. You’re not self-publishing.

You’re independently publishing.

And the first step in independently publishing your book is to make a series of choices. The first and in many ways most important choice is what are you going to publish. You’re not only a writer, but you’re a book lover as well. So having a physical book that you can fondle and sniff and gaze at on a shelf is the most important thing to you.

Okay, that leads to some choices. What form will your book take? Every writer fantasizes seeing their book as a hardcover, a classy old-school hardcover with a dust cover and maybe even an embossed cover with gold foil. That speaks real class.

But it also speaks big bucks. Times are hard, and readers are reluctant to shell out north of thirty bucks for a hardcover, especially a hardcover by an author they may not have even heard of. Yo’ momma and Crazy Aunt Agnes may love you that much, but that ain’t exactly a target-rich environment.

So you punt and decide to go with a paperback. But that forces a series of choices. Do you want a mass market paperback to minimize costs and make it possible for your book to fit on those wire racks in stores of the grocery and drug kind? You can go that way if you want, but historically speaking, the days when mass market paperbacks ruled the retail book space were over about two decades ago. And the chances of an indie pubbed book getting picked up by a major distributor and winding up in a Kroger, Walmart or Costco are about as good as winning the Powerball.

Okay, you reason, let’s go with the trade paperback. But again, that incites a series of choices. What trim size do want for your trade paperback? What kind of paper do you want? In the early days of indie-pubbed books, your only option was the white paper that was similar to what came out of a Xerox machine. This kind of paper, combined with the early binding and production quality of a print-on-demand book screamed self-published. So you want to go with something a little classier than that. But you also want to hit that sweet spot between size and production costs, the number of pages and your word count. You also have to consider the genre. Science fiction fans and romance readers have different expectations. You might have to go to a bunch of bookstores with a measuring tape and start researching this.

Then you go on from there. Let’s consider eBooks. I realize that this may be opening up a real can o’ worms for some folks. Some people hate eBooks. I know people whose intelligence I admire and respect that absolutely cannot abide eBooks.

But let me interject a little bit of reality here.

The idea of a digital or electronic presentation of a book actually dates back to the 1930s. But it was in 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle eBook reader, that eBooks came into their own.

And let me state this as bluntly as I can. The invention and launch of the Kindle was the most significant, game-changing, revolutionary event to hit book publishing since that fellow Gutenberg invented the first usable system of moveable type almost 500 years ago. This is not an overstatement. The eBook has made modern independent publishing both profitable and possible. It has created a whole new industry. It has enabled thousands (and on its way to being millions) of authors to bring their work to the public. And like throwing a rock into a still pond, the ripple effect keeps widening every day. There are multiple distribution channels for eBooks, up to and including you can now borrow eBooks from libraries just like physical books. And there are more being invented and created every day.

Millions of readers now gobble up eBooks by the gigabyte. For certain genres—especially popular ones like romances, mysteries, thrillers—eBooks are rapidly becoming one of the chief ways readers read.

So here’s the bottom line: if you’re going to independently publish your own work, then you’ll bypass eBooks at your own peril. There are extremely successful independently published authors out there who only publish eBook versions of their work, either that or they publish print versions solely as vanity or corollary editions.

Because eBooks are so much cheaper to produce and distribute than print books, you can price them lower and make more money (sometimes much more money) than you can with print. EBooks are also much easier and faster to produce. Next month, I’ll introduce you to an app that will have you formatting your first eBook in a matter of hours.

So that’s where we’ll go next month. We’ll explore how you format and produce eBooks and how you decide where and how to distribute eBooks. It’s a whole new world out there.

Jump in and hold on.