“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s a line we’ve all heard, but how many people are likely to buy a book with a terrible cover?

The journey of self-publishing has been a great learning experience, but there were a few things that I already knew. One of those things was the importance of a good cover. So I will discuss things that I considered when I had an artist create the cover for Bloodlines and what I sadly learned after.

I took into consideration that Bloodlines would be an e-book and knew the cover would need to look just as good in thumbnail size. I suggest browsing through the books available online and study the various covers. I went on Amazon and scrolled through countless covers that looked great up close, but made poor choices for a thumbnail size. I knew I wanted something designed that had bold print and a single focus point.

Designed by Dominique Rollins

I am reading lots of blogs and articles about writing and publishing that I wish i’d read before starting my own adventure. Oh well sometimes we learn the hard way. What I learned after my cover was designed was not shocking information, but I was shocked that I never considered it. Cohesive covers for a series. Yep, somehow that never even crossed my mind. It’s fortunate that this won’t hurt me too much for my series because I feel confident that I can make the sequel have a cover showing cohesion with Bloodlines. But think about some of the book series that you enjoy and picture the covers. Without knowing the title for the next book in a series, you can usually point it out by the cover. I can go to a book store and just glance at titles and say, “Oh Kim Harrison has a new book out? This must be from the Rachel Morgan series.”

Janet Evanovich’s Plum series always uses bright colors for the covers and the title (which always refers to the book’s order in the series) is done in an eye-catching font. The Twilight Saga also has a very cohesive series of covers. I want my readers to also see some cohesion so i’ll be considering this factor in my future projects.

Hope that someone is reading this and will find use of the information for their WIP. Thanks for reading and stay awesome!