Authors

A Parable for Book Covers
Imagine you’re the parent of a 16 year old girl. It’s Friday night, the work week is over, you’ve just settled in with a good book and the perfect cup of tea. Then there’s the faint notion of legs in some corner of your periphery. It wasn’t quite enough to raise suspicions, but…

“Bye, I’m going out.”

Legs, going out, Friday night…

To shame with the book, your parent hat is on in a flash and you catch her just before she walks out the door. Her idea, apparently, of decent Friday night duds—a pair of pink fishnet stockings (replete with tear), t-shirt branded Dirty Girl, bra strap plainly visible, denim skirt that you're now wondering why you ever bought for her… An unidentified car horn honks.

“I’ve got to go, my friends are waiting!”

Images of baby pictures burn in your mind, her first word, the spelling bee title, but couldn’t you just shove over this once and let her go out? Of course not!!!

But oh-so-many self-published authors are doing this very thing with their books!

Your book, like your daughter, is meaningful, it’s planned, it’s worried about and fussed over, sometimes it says things that surprise even you. Unfortunately nobody will ever get to meet your true book if it’s allowed to walk the street in pink fishnet stockings.

Kidding aside, we know it’s expensive to commission cover artwork. And we know you’d never let your book parade in fishnets if you could do anything about it. We believe firmly in the power of the self-published author, and it is our opinion that self-publishing and small-publishing are valuable literary forces. But where self-publishing fails, almost uniformly, is on marketing.

When self-publishing you must have a marketing strategy for your book

A marketing strategy is unique, it is tailored to your book and it is the make-break point of any successful self-publishing endeavor. But every marketing strategy begins with a professional book cover. All further efforts are totally defeated without a high quality book cover. Because, like our teenage daughter, no one will take a poorly dressed book seriously. It just doesn’t happen.

If you are a serious self-publisher, your book cover is an essential investment and it can yield great return.

Here are the vital points that any successful book cover must achieve:

• First it must catch the eye of your reader, both from a distance (for print) and at a very small size (as in digital thumbnails), and it must somehow set itself apart from competing books. This is accomplished through artistic knowledge of composition, color, contrast, etc.
• Then it needs to communicate a bit of what is best about your book to your reader. This can be done with a thorough grasp of what makes the book unique and interesting.
• Finally, it must inspire your reader to crack open the book and read its first sentence. That is done by creating a mystery in the image on your book cover, or some question that can only be answered by opening the book.

This is really true, I invite you to browse through your favorite book store and note the natural process you follow in selecting a book to read. You will see these steps in action.

At Nico Illustration we have made book covers our life.

We understand the ins and outs of crafting meaningful book cover artwork that reaches your readers and gets them to pick up your book. And we love to help self-publishers to succeed and grow their name.

And because we understand your marketing budget can be a hefty expense, we've developed a self-publishing book cover service that begins at $500.00

Our process works like this:

Take some time to fill out our detailed Book Cover Assessment Survey. This gives Nico, our illustrator, all of the knowledge he needs to understand exactly where your book fits in the overall market. It’s also a valuable marketing tool that will help you begin formulating a successful marketing strategy.

Nico does market research to understand clearly how to make your book stand out. You’ll get a copy of this.

You are given thumbnail (small, rough) sketches of various cover solutions to get the major elements and direction of the cover established. Each will come with a brief description.

The final drawing is now developed and all details are hashed out exactly. Any revisions are made here so that the final image comes out exactly as desired.

The final artwork is created.

If you like, we can also handle the title treatment.

We’re excited to start on your book cover!

Take our comprehensive Book Cover Assessment Survey.

When you finish you’ll receive a free, tailored report of exactly what needs your book cover must fulfill to compete in the marketplace and capture your readers.

“Nico Photos is an absolute pleasure to work with, professional in his business dealings and prompt with deliverables, and we were blown away by his ability to listen and ask the right questions to produce exactly what was needed. His preliminary sketches were so good that we could have used one of them, and the final image goes beyond awesome, capturing everything we had hoped for and more. I can recommend Nico’s work without hesitation and will certainly be offering him future illustration projects myself.” — C.C. Lifting Up Veronica