Testing different covers in the marketplace

llorelei · May 28, 2014

Hello,

Any thoughts or experience on testing different book cover concepts/layouts in the marketplace. (I'm using Amazon CreateSpace). I have a cover that may be working against me. It would be great to do a whole new treatment and see if sales soar.

thx.

WeaselFire · May 28, 2014

llorelei said:
Any thoughts or experience on testing different book cover concepts/layouts in the marketplace.

Welcome to Absolute Write. Learn to use the search function. Start here:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=218

Jeff

Drachen Jager · May 28, 2014

You're a self-published author with (I presume) no history, celebrity status, connections, or money to promote your novel.

There are so many things working against you.

Given the current state of the self-published market, your odds of making any kind of money from your (presumed) starting position are essentially equal to your chances of winning the lottery. Even a truly glorious cover isn't likely to help much.

llorelei · May 28, 2014

WeaselFire said:
Welcome to Absolute Write. Learn to use the search function. Start here:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=218

Jeff

Sorry, Jeff. I wasn't able to find anything using the search function about testing different covers in the marketplace. Do you have an idea about which thread you were referring to with the search function?

Sage · May 28, 2014

Moved to a more useful subforum for the topic

veinglory · May 28, 2014

The easiest way to test cover options, in the absence of a full professional marketing team, is to post the options on a forum.

JournoWriter · May 28, 2014

It might also be helpful if you gave some sort of specifics. "Testing in the marketplace" is pretty vague.

frimble3 · May 29, 2014

And if your 'whole new treatment' suckers 'the marketplace' into thinking it's a whole new book, and 'the marketplace' buys the same old book again, 'the marketplace' is going to be really, really annoyed.
It's bad enough when publishers do this for new editions.

llorelei · May 29, 2014

Drachen Jager said:
You're a self-published author with (I presume) no history, celebrity status, connections, or money to promote your novel.

There are so many things working against you.

Given the current state of the self-published market, your odds of making any kind of money from your (presumed) starting position are essentially equal to your chances of winning the lottery. Even a truly glorious cover isn't likely to help much.

Well, that's a cheery outlook. I'm not saying the cover is going to sell the book like crazy. But if one cover sells 5% more books than another cover, than it's worth testing. For example, 50 Shades of Grey has nothing but a necktie on the cover, whereas other romance novels have characters in sexy poses. There must be some data on performance for the various types of artwork. And regarding first time writers and how we all suck and could never expect to earn a penny, how about Margaret Atwood, L. Frank Baum, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. And here's some ebook success stories for you: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-h-balson/bestseller-success-storie_b_4064574.html

Alessandra Kelley · May 29, 2014

I think part of the problem is while there may, somewhere, be data on performance of types of artwork, it isn't necessarily reliable, accurate, or applicable.

There are many different possibilities influencing a book's sales, and unless you can control for all of them it is difficult to tell whether one particular cover or another makes a huge difference.

What seems to be true is that a poorly designed cover pretty much guarantees poor sales. Beyond that, there are no guarantees.

If one type of book cover consistently sold better than others, it would dominate the market. Instead what we have is changing fashions in book covers, where a highly successful book's cover style is quickly imitated by others.

The are, to be sure, styles in book cover design that are helpful to clue potential readers in that this is something they might like. These change over time and from genre to genre. I gather, for instance, that there are tropes and expectations in romance book covers that alert readers to subtle distinctions within the genre.

I think experimenting with alternate cover designs is a reasonable thing to try. Publishers have been doing it since forever.

Veinglory's suggestion may be helpful. Might you be interested in posting possible covers here? We have numerous art and design professionals on the board who can help with a fresh eye.

llorelei · May 29, 2014

Thanks, Everyone. I'm wondering more about the cover concept than about the design and/ layout.
For example, which of these two covers (with entirely different concepts) do you think would be more apt to draw its genre audience?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078IPNCW/?tag=absowrit-20

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/b...releases-new-adult-contemporary-romance-novel

I bet if you ran one concept for a week on Amazon and another concept for a different week you would see some sort of sales difference between the two. Just wondered if anyone has tried that.

(And no, per the other email, the goal is not to dupe readers into reading the same thing twice)

veinglory · May 29, 2014

It is worth replacing your cover if you current cover is, well, bad enough to be costing you sales.

As for the covers you showed. They are indeed for uttering different types of book. But I would say the first one is adequate at best (assuming it is for something on the chick lit spectrum) but not great and rather disconcerting. I mean, where is the rest of her body?

I really only think within genre comparisons make much sense.

llorelei · May 29, 2014

Thanks, Veinglory. Most products do comparison testing. Books should be no different. It would be cool to have a site where people can vote on covers. Maybe there is a common denominator.

WeaselFire · May 29, 2014

One of the better posts/articles I've saved is:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/12/15-ebook-covers-success-and-failure-in-the-kindle-store/

Kindle lets you change covers, so it's possible to test. Not sure that it's a viable test though. Posting your covers and asking opinions may not be valid either.

The AIGA competition is helpful:

http://www.aiga.org/about-50-50/

Jeff

Polenth · May 29, 2014

Something that might work for what you want is to post the cover here, and ask people what sort of book they'd expect from the cover. It's the other way around to a normal critique, but if appropriateness for genre is the worry, it'll give you some answers. You'll also find if it looks amateurish, because answers could be, "I expect a book with terrible editing."

Doing something like that first seems a good idea, because it won't take you very long. Whereas making multiple covers for the same book will take a long time. You could end up spending a long time on that when you'd be better off working on something else.

I don't see general voting would work, because people will pick the prettiest even if it's completely wrong for the book.

jairey · May 30, 2014

Another Site

http://lousybookcovers.com/?p=3055&relatedposts_exclude=6140

This article (The site also has discussions of book covers and offers critiques) shows some books that have changed covers.

One good idea is to put together more-than-one "sample" cover and ask for feedback. You'll tend to get better information from even your best friends when they are asked to choose.

Lord of Chaos · May 30, 2014

As others have said posting some examples on AW and asking for specific feedback on what the critics would expect is about the best you can get. For the specific two covers you posted I like the second better, but that isn't based on what I think is in the book (and since I don't read romance I don't have the foggiest expectations), but simply a personal preference.

While I believe a bad cover will certainly hurt your book, I believe the best attribute of a good cover is to increase the number of people who notice the book. If it's a fantastic story and everyone's talking about it, nobody's going to give two cents what the cover is and if it's a bad story a great cover won't save it--when people talk it will be about the content, not what's on the cover.

llorelei · Oct 22, 2014

Ok. I did the test!! Check out this infographic for the most effective cover.
http://s16.postimg.org/gi22pbkg5/Cover_Test_Infographic.jpg

Hapax Legomenon · Oct 22, 2014

So that's your actual data? Interesting, but I wouldn't consider it all that surprising -- the second one especially looks like an ACT prep manual, not a romance cover.

llorelei · Oct 23, 2014

Hapax Legomenon I agree with you about the second one, but it makes more sense when you read the subtitle: Diary of My Unexpected Passion For Another Woman." That was the first experiment toward a less overtly sexual cover. The thing about an experiment is that it can fail.

Testing different covers in the marketplace

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

WeaselFire

Benefactor Member

Drachen Jager

Professor of applied misanthropy

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

Sage

Supreme Guessinator

veinglory

volitare nequeo

JournoWriter

Just the facts, please

frimble3

Heckuva good sport

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

Alessandra Kelley

Sophipygian

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

veinglory

volitare nequeo

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

WeaselFire

Benefactor Member

Polenth

Mushroom

jairey

Lord of Chaos

Let Chaos reign

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author

Hapax Legomenon

llorelei

San Francisco - Romance Author