They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover, yet at first glance, a book cover is all people will know about your e-book. If you create an e-book cover yourself without any graphic design knowledge, chances are good you’ll create an amateurish cover that won’t look as appealing to others. The solution is to get a graphics designer to create an e-book cover for you.
If you browse the Internet, you can find graphic designers willing to create great e-book covers for $200 or more. While their work is probably excellent, the cost may be prohibitive. After all, if you’re selling novels for 99 cents, spending $200 up front can be a huge expense. Will a $200+ expense for a professionally designed book cover help increase sales so you earn back the cost of the book cover design? maybe, maybe not.
Here’s another solution. On a site called Fivrr, people offer their services for $5 or more. So you can get a basic e-book cover designed for just $5, which will likely be better than anything you could do yourself if you’re not a graphics designer. For a little more, you can add pictures or other fancy graphics designs, but the total cost will be far less than $200.
An e-book cover designed by someone on Fivrr will likely be good enough to get you started. Then if your e-books start selling, consider paying more for a better designed e-book cover if you’re not completely happy with your current one. The goal is to spend a s little as possible upfront.
The usual temptation is to spend a lot of money upfront by thinking “it takes money to make money.” That’s wrong. It takes creativity to make money. Just spending money wildly won’t guarantee you’ll make money. You could take out a million dollar Super Bowl ad to promote your e-book and that would spend money, but would it translate into a million dollars worth of sales that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise? Maybe, maybe not.
If you’re just getting started selling e-books, keep your costs to a minimum until you figure out how well your particular e-books sell. Then gradually use your profits to pay for more marketing such as paying for a better designed e-book. Ideally, you should be creating e-books that support each other and target the same audience, so you’ll likely want to create the same look of your covers for all your e-books.
That means if you find a good graphic designer on Fivrr, you may want to stick with that person to create other e-book covers for you inexpensively. Spend as little as possible upfront so you can learn more about e-book marketing. Start with Fivrr to get someone to design your e-book covers and if you start making money, then reinvest in a better cover if you think that will increase sales. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to find out.