Quote:
Originally Posted by ecbritz
Sorry zelda_pinwheel and jellby! Someone told me it was jellby's work.
The Three Men in a Boat e-book feat suggests to me that an e-book cover should not always be treated as if it were a paper book cover. An e-book cover could for instance be treated as one half of a two-page design, the second page being the title page or anything else that would be striking, interesting or informative as a counter-page. The design could take a possible portrait view, landscape view, single-page view, double-page view, small scale (phone) view and large scale (computer screen) view into account, aiming to produce a satisfying result in all cases. In paper books for children, the idea of extending and developing the cover design into the pages that follow has been exploited for many decades. What seems problematical to me, is the thumbnail, usually derived from the cover page, used to advertise e-books. Perhaps a cover or its counter-page could contain a thumbnail to be cropped from it? Sorry for musing out loud about the cover I'm working on, I suppose I'm testing the waters.
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ecbritz:
In my experience, nobody gives two craps about the cover inside the actual ebook file. Only the authors/publishers, certainly not the buyers. The last time I looked, the Dresden Files series didn't even
include the covers with their Kindle editions. Is it nice to provide a cover, so that the book can look good on the various and sundry device's shelves? (E.g., the K-Fire and the iBooks app, the Nook, etc.)? Yes, of course.
But what really matters is the thumbnail on the retailer sites. I've seen super covers sell really mediocre books, and I've seen incredibly crappy covers break very, very good books. A bad cover--particularly a white backgrounded-cover with no border--will kill a book's life. Humans are magpies; we pick up bright, pretty shiny things. When a book buyer is browsing the "shelves" at Amazon, s/he is attracted by good covers first, over anything else (assuming all unknown-to-the-buyer authors). The cover gets them to the blurb, which in turn gets them to the LITB, which hopefully gets them to the free sample and then the purchase.
Don't worry about how anyone reads an ebook on a device, or whether it's held in landscape or portrait; only worry about how the cover looks on a very busy website. Everything else is just...worry for no reason. The vast majority of books have a SRL (start reading location) set well past the cover; I can't think of a single book I've bought where I've ever flipped back to see the cover, and my random and utterly unscientific polls amongst other ebook buyers say the same thing, by a huge margin. Nobody looks at covers after they buy the book, unless there's some reason to (a clue, for example). Focus on the buyer, not the reader. By the time the reader sees your cover,
inside the book, you're 90% of the way home. At that point, the bigger worry is the first 1300 words, not the cover.
JMHO, but seriously: think the retail site, not how the cover will look
inside the ebook.
Hitch