Book Covers

We all know the adage that a book is judged by its cover and,for me at least, initially that is true. When I'm browsing in a bookstore, if I am not in search of a particular book, often I'll pick up a book with a cover I like. I prefer simple covers. But just because I'm an author doesn't mean I know anything about book covers, at least in a marketing and sales sense.

My book that came out last month with Oxford University Press SA, Thato Lekoko: Superhero has a cover I didn't like at all at first, it was too busy for my liking.  Now that it is out I've grown to like it. It's quite colourful and I hope it will attract kids, the folks I hope will be reading it. We'll have to see how it goes in the long run.

This article at Huffington Post gives great advice to authors about how to look at their book covers. In most cases, publishers will give authors a chance to have a look at the proposed covers and it's good for the author to have a bit of knowledge beforehand to limit the emotion-factor. For example, in the article they make a good point about not undermining your reader by being too literal.

One of my favourite book covers from my own books is this one:

It violated one of the points in the article since it uses a photo taken by a blogging friend, but still I think it's a lovely cover. 

I think the most important point from the article is this: "...what matters most is not that it (the book cover) tell the story of your whole book, but that it evoke an emotion that's pure and on point with your message or story."