Now let’s discuss the color of the covers in this screen shot below:
This exemplifies the importance of cover design, and specifically, the importance of planning ahead when designing your cover, or working with a cover designer. You want your book to STAND OUT on search results pages like this, which means you want to avoid having a white cover. After all, let’s look closely at the screen shot above. The only cover that is harder to see and pay attention to than the 6th cover is the 8th one, and that’s because the 8th cover is missing!
Does this mean you should never design a white book cover? Well…. maybe. I would challenge book cover designers to rise to the occasion in the “Amazon world” and create covers that are specifically designed to be seen on visual search results pages like the one above. That means, no white covers. But, even if the book cover for the physical book itself is white, that doesn’t mean your Amazon cover has to be.
Gasp! Change the cover image just for Amazon? Yes – and in past posts I’ve given specific examples of how I’ve personally done that with my Sell Your Book on Amazon listing. The actual cover is 2/3 orange and 1/3 white. That’s too much white for me, so for the Amazon cover image, I replaced the white with an obnoxious bright yellow. You know what? It works. In fact, if you look at the screen shot above, there’s a chance the most noticeable book cover among ALL the books on that page is that big bright yellow cover along the left, which, not coincidentally is for SELL YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON. I say “not coincidentally” because that is actually the result of quite a bit of planning and effort on my part, but as you can see on this Amazon search page, it pays off.
And we can talk about that more in the future, along with why you would want to create a cover image specifically for Amazon (and how you do that).
President of Outskirts Press 