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Originally Posted by rhadin
Interesting experience. However, it was not what I was referring to when I suggested cover design as costing $2,000+.
As with everything else there is more to cover design than just slapping image and text together. The better cover designers actually read the manuscript to get an idea of what the book is about and try to create original artwork/design that reflects or captures the essence of the book. The best designers get a lot more than $2,000 and are well worth their price.
Why? Think about your book buying experience at your local bookstore. A book has to compete for your attention with hundreds of other books that surround it and so it must grab your attention quickly. It is the cover that does this (or doesn't). If the cover doesn't encourage you to pick up the book, you will not read the jacket copy to determine if it is a book that might interest you, and you won't open the book to scrutinize the text.
Covers are a book's first impression and the book only has a few seconds to make a good impression. That is what you pay a cover designer to do -- grab a prospect's attention. You could be the most brilliant of authors -- perhaps the greatest author of all time -- but if no one buys your book, no one will ever know. And as people buy your books, the cover becomes less important because your name increasingly becomes the driver of sales. But until that point in time, you need to grab the prospect and the way it is done is by the cover.
Additionally, a good cover designer asks about how the book will be marketed and who the target audience is, and takes that into consideration when designing the cover so that the design can fulfill multiple needs.
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I believe you're right - for about 35%-45% of the 'first-time-I've-read-anything-by-this-author' purchases. The cover art can reel me in to at least read the title, and maybe the back-cover blurb (or inside front flap for dust-jacketed hardcovers). From there, if my interest is piqued (picqued? I'm always forgetting this one.), I'll move on to reading the first couple of pages. By then, for a new author, or new series by a known author, I'll have made my choice to buy or not. Which is why I rely so much on Amazon's 'Search Inside' feature for online shopping. It gives me a chance to do more 'research' than the tiny blurb one gets at Fictionwise or eReader.com.
Still, I've seen great stories which have 'artistic' cover art by well-known artists (and some no-previous-samples) which clearly were created without ever bothering to crack open the pages of the book. Barf!
I try, given that I've got decent Photoshop skills, to create a basic idea of what I want for my covers. I don't expect them to be used in the final but it gives a better idea of what scene I'd like imaged.
Right now I'm working on creating a sample cover for a friend's work which he's shopping around. It can be time-consuming!
Derek