What Should NOT Go On a Book Cover

What should not go on a book cover?

Let's start off with some of the obvious things. And these are not so much that your cover will be rejected by Amazon as that it will make it hard to advertise. Facebook and Amazon do not like covers with anything too overtly sexual or anything with too overtly violent.

So, weapons - especially if they're pointing at the reader - bad idea.

And weapons in general can be a little iffy when you're advertising.

Man-chest gets a little iffy on both Amazon and for advertising. You’ll want to make sure his nipples are covered if you can, by either a shirt, his arms, or the font. It can still be risky so a lot of authors just go for mostly clothed or partially clothed, even for the spicer books.

If the couple looks like they’re about to engage in intimacies, especially if they look like they’re possibly stripping each other, that’s going to be a big no.

Anything where the woman is in her underwear is going to make it more difficult to stay out of the Amazon dungeon and to advertise.

You might think, 'Oh, well, that doesn't matter to me; I'm not advertising yet, anyway.'

But one day you might want to advertise that book. Maybe it takes off after release in a way that you didn’t expect and you can afford to put money towards it… except you can’t without changing the cover. So now you have to change the cover in order to be able to advertise it.

The other thing that I see on covers all the time that doesn’t belong there, but that authors really want to put on their covers, is symbolism.

Let's say there's something in your book that you feel is important. For example, an oak tree. This oak tree is where the two characters meet for the first time. Maybe they also say the L word for the first time underneath it. So you might say - there needs to be an oak tree on the cover.

You reject cover after cover becaause the tree on it is wrong - it’s a maple or a birch and you’re tearing your hair out because you can’t find a couple you like with an oak tree in the background and every time you try to put the two things together, somehow it just doesn’t work.

But does the oak tree really need to be on the cover?

I see authors all the time who say “this one element is super important to the plot of my book and so it needs to be on the cover.”

But important to the plot does not equate to being important to selling the book.

The only people who know the importance of the oak tree are the ones who have already read the book. And they’re probably not going to look at the cover and go “oh there's that thing from the book that's so cool I must go now go and tell everyone about this book because of this thing on the cover that's in the book.”

What ends up happening a lot of the time is that authors get really, really, really attached to having that thing on the cover, and having that thing on the cover actually does nothing to help them sell the book.

The cover is an advertisement for your book, so if a reader doesn't know that that oak tree is super, super important to the contents of the book, they just look at it it's an oak tree! And if they wanted to read a thriller or crime and they see an oak tree, that doesn't scream 'crime' and 'thriller' to them. If they wanted to read a mystery and they see an oak tree, yeah, that doesn't really scream 'mystery'.

We have to learn to let go of these all these symbolic things that we want to put on our cover solely because it speaks to the story.

If it’s really important to you and you can work it onto the cover while keeping the cover on brand and on genre, absolutely, go for it! It’s not going to hurt sales as long as you’ve got the first two things. But I've seen so many authors get so hung up on having these elements worked into the cover that they don’t care if their book is on brand / on genre as long as that oak tree is on there, and then their book doesn't sell, and they ask, 'Why isn't my book selling?'

A lot of the time, they’ll wait months until they finally try changing their cover to something that does fit their genre… and that’s when their book starts selling.

My own example - I desperately wanted a D20 dice on the background of my Dungeon Master book. Because there is a D&D group in the book. But that D20 just confused readers, most of whom didn’t know what it was. It confused the genre because a lot of them thought it was some kind of magic symbol, or that it made the cover look paranormal. It actually took away from the cover model standing out on the book. I finally changed it after a few years when I realized I’d run afoul of not following my own advice.

And, obviously, Amazon won’t let me run ads to this book, but I already knew that was going to happen because of the genre so I didn’t care about choosing this image for the cover. Facebook still lets me advertise it when I want to.

These are the things I’m mindful of whenever I get a new cover now.

• Will I be able to advertise it?

• What platforms will I be able to advertise it on?

• Does it tell readers what the genre is from a glance?

• Does it match my brand?

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