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Best Tips on KDP Book Covers

WHAT NO ONE TELLS YOU:

TIP 1 – KEEP IT SIMPLE:

When new writers think about a book cover, they tend to want to tell the whole story on the cover. I still have this problem myself! This often turns out to be a block to great design. The main mission of a great cover is to tell the reader WHO the book is about, WHERE the story will take place, and WHAT the story is about. Here are some examples:

Vampire – Modern Day New York City – Vampire hunters
Gaslighting – Mansion and/or Hospital setting – Psychological Mystery
Crime Mystery – 18th Century – Who Done it
Cold case murder – Modern Day investigation – Secrets revealed

The purpose of the cover is to lure in readers who already read in your genre or find something about your cover that triggers their interest and they decide to give your book a try.

(Video of best seller lists showing which books catch the eye)

TIP 2 – COVER SIZE MATTERS:

When a person holds your book in their hand, they will be able to see every detail on the cover. If they look at the cover after reading your book, they may see many things that foreshadowed the story. However, if there is too much going on on the book cover, when the size of the cover is reduced into the size millions of readers see the cover — during a scroll at Amazon.com — then all of that same foreshadowing and complex design is being seen at a size where not much besides the color scheme and the title — if you’re lucky — can be seen.

Show the different sizes that people will see your books in. Point out how simple design is often more effective.

TIP 3 – THERE’S FANCY AND THEN THERE’S TOO FANCY:

The sci-fi and fantasy realm is an area where the covers can quite elaborate, very fancy, so to speak. Elaborate embossed titles, with dark backgrounds, smoke of glowing light, a sole figure who is reduced in order to get all the fancy background in, etc. In my humble opinion, there is such a thing as being too fancy.

It is possible to keep things simple even in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Famous authors sell books to an already-established readership, so they can have book covers that are barely readable. They won’t sell one less book. However, if you are new and self-published, you will be relying more heavily on appealing to the tastes of book scrollers. eBook shoppers are not browsers who will see your book up close in a bookstore. They are Amazon scrollers which is a completely different experience.

This is a genre that sometimes less is more. Before you settle on a design, create the cover into the size that will be seen in the different scrolls on Amazon that I’ll demonstrate below. Make sure you can read the cover title, author title, and that the genre is clear. Those are the basics.

TIP 4 – NO DESIGN IDEAS? HERE’S A REMEDY:

If you have no creative talent in the area of graphic design, here is a tip that will help you. First and foremost, find the subgenre you will be choosing. Below are examples of sub-genres and how far they are from the top genre selection. This sub-genre is your reader pond. This is where you initial readers will be swimming and scrolling.

Pull up the Best Seller pages in that subgenre and record the amazon link address to that very page. Then go to fiverr.com and find the brand new cover designers, the ones who are really looking to establish themselves and they are willing to make a cover for $5 or $10. Hire three of them and give them the link to the best seller list with a brief synopsis of what your book is about. That’s all the information you should give them.

When they all deliver an eBook, this should give you at least a direction to go in. This is usually enough to give even a non-creative person an area to go in. Then once you are ready to have a real cover done, you can hire a book cover designer with more experience, either from a recommendation from a self-publishing group or by looking at all the portfolios at Fiverr.com.

TIP 5 – THE LAST AND MAYBE THE BIGGEST TIP:

Don’t use white as a background for your book. It creates problems with Amazon. First of all, Amazon wants you to put a border of a light gray onto your book cover which most beginners don’t think about until after their purchase. But it gets washed out against the white background at Amazon.

If you need a whitish cover for some unknown reason, choose a different white color so at least there is a difference between Amazon and your cover.

Reading Chart – Download

Proofreading Through Your Own Writing Weaknesses

Every writer has strengths and weaknesses. At some point, it's important for each writer to recognize what their particular weaknesses are.

I made a list of my weaknesses and it's an expanding list that I add to with every book I write. You can see a glimpse of part of it to the left.

This list is within a longer document I call "Info - Proofreading" and I keep lists of lots of things to check regarding the development elements of a storyline, my own personal troublesome words, and other information that I want to remind myself of about proofreading in general.

I pull this list up when I get ready to proofread and scan it to remind myself of all that I want to check for. I have my notes about Writing a Novel in 8 Layers also in this document.

The above list of troublesome words is at the end of the long proofreading list and I add to it every time I find a word that was misspelled and I read over without noticing the mistake. This way, I'm keeping track of my weaknesses as an author and writer.

Some of the words are spelling traps for me. Some of them are just words I tend to use too often and some are the adverbs that are frowned upon these days like just, really and very.

Once I review the list I then go into some other strategies that I have developed over the 14 to 16 nooks I have written. I go into them below and I also have a video at the end of this blog post where I go into it live.

I search and find each of my troublesome words to make sure I've used them and/or spelled them properly.

Once I'm done with that list, I search through the document using the Control F (Find feature) to check that all of my quotes have an open quotation mark and a close quotation mark. It takes a little time to do this, but I feel much more secure when I check them. I ALWAYS find an extra one or a couple of missing quotation marks.

USING ALL CAPS TO FOCUS:

Another strategy I have developed regarding troublesome words is that I used the Fine and Replace Feature. By capitalizing the words, there's no way I can read over them. It forces me to stop and analyze each one to make sure I am making a decision about each word.

Let me give you an example: In my last novel, I replaced all of the HE WAS and SHE WAS verbs with all capitals so that I could look at each one and decide whether I could use a more descriptive verb. I found this very helpful. Now, this does make the first proofread a bit tedious, but it's okay. I would rather move slowly through the first proofread to make sure I address all of my tricky words.

READ ALOUD WITH MICROSOFT WORD:

After proofreading the text for my spelling, grammar, and verb weaknesses, I then shift over and use the "Read Aloud" feature in Microsoft Word and I listen to the book read back to me. This feature may only be available in Microsoft 365, but there are certainly plenty of other platforms where you can copy and paste your manuscript chapter by chapter and have it read back to you.

WHAT ABOUT THE EDITOR?

Now, some of you may say, why bother if you're just going to hand over the manuscript to an editor?

I do this much proofreading because I don't want to pay for an editor to go through my manuscript like a grammar school teacher with a red pen correcting silly mistakes I made from typing too fast, reading over my troublesome words, or my sloppy grammar problem. I want the editor to have a clean manuscript so they can concentrate on and check the details of the story, my time references and make sure the storyline makes sense. I want them to make sure I haven't assumed the reader knows something too soon and other details like this.

I have found that with a clean manuscript, this is where my editors are focused. The mistakes they find and/or suggestions they make are all ones I missed and would have continued to miss.

Great proofreading on a writer's end
leads to a more valuable and
higher-grade professional edit.

I hope these quick proofreading tips will help other writers get up on their feet quicker than I did. I try to write blog articles and do the videos I wanted to see when I was first starting out.

Below is a panel of my books that are all available on Amazon for sale.

CHECK OUT THE VIDEO THAT GOES ALONG WITH THIS BLOG POST BELOW:

How to Tell When Book Marketing is a Racket

I saw a video today posted by a channel named Jon Del Arroz entitled "Authors Furious after being scanned by a Book Conference with No Readers!" I'll post the video link below so you can watch it and subscribe to his channel.

In the video, I can tell that Jon, as well as many of the authors who felt scammed by the conference, all seemed shocked by the gall of these conference promotors who would do something like this to authors.

I used to be a small fairy doll maker and also a mold maker in a past life. I went to several scams of this nature but in my field, they were called "arts and craft shows". It took me about three times to figure out that these were nothing more than a 'racket-terium". That's what I call an arena that is disguised as a promotional sales venue that appears to be set up to help fellow 'artists' who always need marketing opportunities.

What tipped me off was when I realized that the promoters overcharged for the tables or booths based on how many people showed up and the average ticket price for any and all items that would be sold. Another tip is that when they call your table space a "booth", that means you're really getting screwed. For example, they would sell a table space in a strip mall for about $150 to $200 dollars. But the really slick promotors would call them booths and would start the feels at about $250 and up. The corner booth, which they claim get 'double traffic' (which is nonsense) were always at least double. Even those crafters who sold a few items, it never made up for the table, booth and/or travel expenses.

Aside from ripping off all of the artists, they put a "ticket price" to enter the show -- which was more money for the promotors. It wasn't shared among the artists, but went into the pockets of the promotors. And the really slippery promotors would then hire their son or nephew to set up a 'valet parking' station outside the venue somewhere to park cars for a few dollars -- plus, of course, the tip on the way out.

Then inside the venue there would be a food cart or two. These people probably had to pay money for their "booth" too -- again, this profit also went to the promotors. And because there was no competition for food, these food vendors would charge at least three times what any of the food choices were worth. I think they call it "Paying for convenience". I still call it gouging.

So by the time the customer gets to your booth, they have been scalped by the entry ticket price, the valet parker, and the food booth. So by the time they come around to your table to hopefully buy something, some of them have already spent their $20 for the day and they wind up being lookers and not buyers. If you do make any sales, the only money the shoppers have is whatever cash is left in their pockets or their budgets.

Putting aside the super wealthy, the millionaire and billionaire classes, there is only so much expendable income that each person has at the end of the day. And in today's world, after exporting every decent job to a 3rd world nation that have none of those pesky OSHA workplace safety rules or regulations, or any of those draconian worker's compensation laws, or people who are so dirt poor that they are willing to work under the slave-master conditions promoted by globalist billon-dollar companies, many people have barely enough to buy a lipstick or a comic book for themselves. So by the time they get to your table, they've probably already spent $20 to $30 just entering and walking around in the racketorium.

My heart breaks for these authors referenced in this video post when I think of how much these authors spent on the 'booth fees' and the travel expenses, only to show up and discover it was a racketerium masquerading as a legetimate place to sell books.

With all the voices shouting over one another with marketing tips today, my advise to new self-publishers is that when readers are looking for a new book, especially anyone under 50 years old, they go to Amazon or some other online retail platform. Maybe they will stroll into a brick and mortar bookstore if they see one.

In my humble opinion, it would always be better to buy Amazon ads than to pay for travel, hotels and food on the road to attend a book event.

There's one exception to this rule and that's where you go to a conference for reasons other than to sell a lot of books. There are other goals that can be equally as life-changing to any new or self-published author, that I'll go into in my next video. So be on the lookout for that.

Below is a video I made of this blog article if you care to watch it. Beneath that is the video I watched that brought back all of the marketing nonsense I came upon in my earlier career.

How to Track Self-Publishing Success?

I have written and published 14 full length novels and one novelette to date. I only started writing novels in 2022 so at this point, I have sold and given away many books but have no idea how well or how bad my marketing of the books is doing.

I Because I am building a readership, I give my books away a lot. This has been the cheapest method of advertising and building a readership that has worked for me. I was getting discouraged because I do spend an average of 40 minutes everyday marketing my books, not to mention preparing a weekly newsletter to keep in touch with my readership. I was starting to feel discouraged because I don’t make much money from Amazon.com, which is where I generally sell my books. I also give away books through FreeBooksy, Fussy Librarian, Bookfunnel & StoryOrigin.

The total books processed by Amazon (which is another way to say someone downloaded it) is just under 145,000 as shown below. Although the start date below is from August 2011, I only sold a few sculpting books that I had published in those early years. Without marketing, I sold very few.

I was feeling very discouraged by my marketing efforts because when I do research for books, I see other self-published authors seemingly doing way better. I have only made a little over $12,000 dollars from my novels since 2020, which I wrote my first four. Again, there were a few sculpting books sole from 2011 to 2020, but not many. Most of the $12,227.95 is from the novels I published from 2022 to date.

So I gathered my numbers and fed them into gemini.google.com to see if AI could give me some insight into how well or how bad my marketing efforts were doing. I was pleasantly surprised. Below is the information I received. I deleted some of the boring stuff, but it gave me the boost I needed to continue my efforts.

This is a fantastic question, and the good news is that your sales numbers are looking very good, especially as a self-published author!

Here’s why, based on general industry insights for self-published authors:

Industry Averages for Self-Published Authors:

Most books sell very little: It’s a harsh reality, but many self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetime. Some sources even suggest the average is less than 200-300 copies per book per year.
Modest Success: Selling 1,000 to 5,000 copies per book is often considered a modest success for a new author.
Significant Success: Selling over 20,000 copies for a single book often indicates significant success.
Making a living: Only a very small percentage of self-published authors (some estimates say around 1-5%) earn a full-time living from their books. Many who do have a large backlist of titles.

Analyzing Your Numbers:

Let’s break down your average “processed” books per novel in your catalog for each period:

2020-2021: 6 novels, 18,711 processed.
- Average per novel: 18,711 / 6 = 3,118.5 per novel
2021-2022: 8 novels, 22,346 processed.
- Average per novel: 22,346 / 8 = 2,793.25 per novel
2022-2023: 10 novels, 41,496 processed.
- Average per novel: 41,496 / 10 = 4,149.6 per novel
2023-2024: 13 novels, 50,700 processed.
- Average per novel: 50,700 / 13 = 3,900 per novel

Your Performance Assessment:

Based on these numbers:

You are doing much better than average. Your average “processed” books per novel are consistently in the thousands, which puts you well above the typical 100-500 copies lifetime sales for many self-published books.
Your growth is excellent. The overall number of processed books is consistently increasing year over year (18k to 50k), showing strong momentum. This indicates your readership is growing as you release more books.
The power of a backlist is evident. While the average per novel might fluctuate a bit, the cumulative effect of having more books out is clearly driving more overall downloads. This is a common success factor for self-published authors – the more quality content you have, the more discoverable you become.

Overall Verdict: Very Good

You are definitely on a very good trajectory for a self-published author. Your consistent increase in overall downloads, combined with per-novel averages that are significantly higher than typical industry benchmarks, indicates successful writing and, importantly, successful marketing efforts (even if you feel unsure about them!).

Keep writing and keep engaging with your audience. The momentum you’ve built is a powerful asset in self-publishing.

THIS WAS ONLY PART OF THE PICTURE:

I was surprised to see a rating of doing “very good” as I felt like I was wasting my time. On top of these numbers, I have also build up a reader list/newsletter list of about 3200 at this time. Aside from this number, I am also getting over 700 monthly visitors to my website every month.

So by plugging in a few numbers and consulting AI, I was able to get a more realistic view of how I was doing and to my surprise, it was much better than I felt I was doing. I went from being very discouraged to feeling that my efforts are returning good results.

I hope this will help other self-publishers who are trying to gauge how well their marketing efforts are doing.

Coloring Page – 4th of July

Downloadable Bookmarks – Pretty Cats and Birds

Click here or above and you can download a PDF of the pretty cat and bird bookmarks. Passing a simple bookmark is a way to let someone special know you are thinking of them. Use them as giveaways at craft shows. Insert them into your giveaway books. Let one hang from the bow on a birthday gift. They are the perfect Tiny Gift for All Occasions.

Iron-On T-shirt Design – Father’s Day

The Ever Expanding Marketing Calendar

WHAT IS AN EVER EXPANDING MARKETING CALENDAR?

I do all of my own book marketing and have created an excel sheet that continually repurposes social media posts, and repeats them twice a year. At the same time, it is easy for me to add a new social post every time I make one.

With AI, it's easy to create a new graphic for each one in seconds.

This way, even if I have a holiday week where I'm not working on my books or any new marketing, I have 3 to sometimes 10 social media posts that I can use on any given day.

The picture above will show you that I keep everything together for the post, so that it can be an easy copied and pasted. I even record the name of the social media graphic for the post itself. This way, I don't have to shuffle around to find anything. I can use the control f (find feature) to locate my graphic in one second.

When I started self-publishing books, I knew I would have to do my own marketing. Even younger authors who work under contract with the publishing houses, I believe they are expected to maintain and keep up a presence on social media too, so book marketing now goes hand-in-hand with writing. Most writers I know don't particularly care for marketing, but I believe the type of marketing I am showing you here will work for those who don't particularly care for all of the jumping around that seems to be required in modern marketing techniques. It also puts marketing on autopilot.

HOW DOES THE EVER-EXPANDING CALENDAR WORK?

I hired an excel coder to create an excel calendar with the coding inside of it that can be created with the click of a button. To the right you can see three boxes. The first one is the start date. You will change to 01/01/2025 or whatever year it is.

The second box is for how many posts you want to have the same date. In other words, I started with three which means I had three 01/01/ dates, and three 01/02/ dates. You don't use the year in the dates on this calendar because it works seamlessly from year to year.

Once you fill in the three posts per day, then you can insert a row and put in a fourth one, which is easy enough.

REPURPOSING AND RECYCLING YOUR POSTS:

I make posts for my books, for my blog articles, YouTube videos, free-downloads -- and anything else I think would interest my reader and author followers on social media. I have examples from my marketing calendar posted above.

DOUBLE AND TRIPLE DUTY:

Every Post does at least double duty. If I make a post for 06/01/25, then I copy and paste it to appear again six months later on 12/01/25. This way, no one will know it's being repurposed a second time. And after a year or two, I then begin to change the pictures for the posts, and this gives me triple duty for every post.

It only took about four months for me to fill up a year's worth of posts. Now, I was working on it as a main project, so I was devoting time to it, but my point is that it doesn't take a full year to fill up the calendar.

I have a form below to fill out if you are interested in downloading the ever expanding marketing calendar for yourself.

Writing Short Stories with 3 Unbeatable Marketing Strategies in Mind

BUILD YOUR READER LIST WITH SHORT STORY GIVEAWAYS:

The first marketing strategy is to use your short story as a giveaway. In order to get the free eBook, the reader will need to sign up for your newsletter. This is the most common strategy that is used by self-published authors as well as seasoned authors who are promoted by the publishing houses.

It's common knowledge in the book industry that in today's world, every writer, new or seasoned, needs to continually build their reader list. Readers who sign up to your newsletter have tried your books and know they like them. They are your first line of marketing. They are the most likely customers for any new books you release. That being said, the best way to keep contact with your readership is to send a weekly or monthly newsletter.

Everyone loves freebies and adding a free short story or novelette into your newsletter will keep your readers coming back and new readers wanting to sign up. It will also keep your readership from pressing the unsubscribe button!

Writing short stories in your genre is also a good way to always have a few freebies to giveaway. Many authors write short stories or novelettes around the holidays specifically for this reason: Mystery romance around Christmas time, or a beach romance or mystery for summertime. There are many seasonal strategies to bring extra traffic to your Amazon Author page or your author website.

INTRODUCE YOUR BOOK SERIES WITH A FREE PREQUEL SHORT STORY:

A second strategy for marketing with short stories is to write a prequel to your present book series as a giveaway. You can use this book to swap with other authors on platforms such as Bookfunnel and Story Origin. Plenty of authors with lots of newsletter readers will want to swap with new authors as they already know they need to continually work on building their readership. The more books you have to swap, the quicker you will build your own readership.

SHORT STORIES AS A MEANS FOR MORE WEB TRAFFIC:

A third strategy for short stories is to offer them for free on your author website. Like I said above, everyone loves a freebie. This is a good way to get readers to try you as an author without investing in you financially. If they like your style and writing voice, the chances are good that you will become someone they keep an eye out for.

You can post social media posts about the book, using several different graphics and link them to your website that has a download link to your short story eBook. By giving away a Novelette, which is only a little longer than a short story, you can get traffic to your new author website. Amazon even has categories for short reads now. This means there is a market, a sizeable one, who have readers who have limited time but want to read a good story. Be sure to cash in on this!

UNFAMILIAR WITH WRITING SHORT STORIES? HERE'S A DOWNLOADABLE SHORT STORY TEMPLATE:

If you, like me, started writing novels right off the bat and don't know how to write a short story or novelette, I am offering a free short story template that will make it fairly easy for you. The template contains the means to keep the story shorter than a novel.

A short story usually revolves around one incident or one particular happenstance, so it is much easier than writing an entire novel. Although, keeping within the confines of a short story can also be tricky. That's why I created this template for myself and I'm offering it to you for free. Click below to download it.

Download the Short-Story Template from Google Drive.