I couldn’t wait to show off my cover, and it was the first real piece of marketing I paid for. That’s right, your cover is an important part of selling your book.
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover…
A book with an eye catching cover will naturally attract more attention. It also should communicate what the book is about, so your ideal reader picks it up.
DIY Cover
It’s fine to make your cover yourself. But, if you do make sure you have permission to use any images, fonts, or any other element in your design. You may need to buy certain licences from the creator to use them.
If you want to design your own cover, check out author Elexis Bell’s blog post series on the topic:
Professional Cover
Commissioning a professional can ensure you make the right impact. Check their portfolio and testimonies to see if they are right for your book. You may find it useful to check out my post on how I found my cover designer.
Cover Reveal Images
You will need to prepare the images for the cover reveal. My Cover Designer included a social media package which included social media banners, 3D Renders and an IG version.
The 3D Renders have been so useful. I often add them to various social media posts I’ve made. I’d highly recommend them.
3D Render
I am fortunate that my cover designer created me 3D renders of my paperback and my eBook. However, if you don’t have that privilege, here are some ways you can obtain one.
- BookBrush helps authors to create images to market their books, including 3D renders. You can try it for free or pay for more options.
- DIY Book helps indie authors create covers and has a tool to easily create 3D Renders.
Stock image
You may want to utilise a stock image within your social media post. Make sure you have permission to use it. Here are my favourite sites:
- Unsplash is a resource of images by photographers made available for free.
- Pixabay is another great resource for free images.
I like searching for flat-lays I can add my book and text to.
Decide on a date
There is a lot of division on when to do your cover reveal. What it boils down to is personal preference.
One successful author recommend 6 months, or as soon as possible. Another, suggested 3 months at most, as they struggled to keep the momentum going. A lot of authors said only a month.
I started mine during the 1st week of September, with the full reveal on 7th September. My book was on preorder on 1st October, and released on 1st December. This worked well from me.
Cover Reveal Teaser
You should have already been talking about your book and generating interest. As your cover reveal approaches you want to incite interest. You can capture peoples curiosity with a partial reveal, announcing the date you will reveal all…
How I created my partial reveal pics…
I created mine by using a torn paper image from Unsplash.
I edited the image in a free app called Adobe Photoshop Mix . I cut out the part of the image where I wanted my book to show through.
I uploaded the cut out image and my cover to Canva. Canva is my favourite app for creating Social Media posts. It was here that I added the text.
If you have Book Brush, you can use their templates to achieve something similar. Personally, I prefer Canva as I have more freedom to do what I want. However, if you are stuck how to start, you might find Book Brush easier as the templates are specifically for authors.
Of course, you could achieve a similar affect by wrapping your book in paper and tearing a teaser rip in the paper. Then take a nice photo. You may still wish to use an app like Canva to add text.
Cover Reveal Team
You can ask friends, family, and/or fans to support you by sharing, liking, and/or commenting on your reveal pic. The more engagement the pic gets, the better it will perform in the algorithm.
Make sure the post is public and that you use hashtags your ideal reader follows. It’s okay to tag the book title but it’s unlikely anyone will be following that hashtag yet, so choose ones that describe the themes and genre of the book.
I was really fortunate that a number of my IG followers were willing to share my cover to their IG stories and I had loads of lovely comments on my post.
If you don’t have anyone to help, you can pay for a cover reveal service. On 1st Nov, I used Xpresso Book Tours for a Book Blitz and was really impressed by how many signed up. They also provide a cover reveal service which I’m sure would be just as good.
Cover Reveal Image
You need a nice picture of your book for social media.
- Manually: Again, you can do this manually by taking a nice picture of the physical book.
- Digitally: I didn’t have a physical copy so I created my image digitally.
I mainly searched Unsplash for flat lays, books, beach, ocean, mermaid, and any other theme relating to my book. I then edited it in Canva.
Keep up the momentum…
Once you have done the cover reveal, you must keep up the momentum until release (and beyond).
It’s a waste of your time to get everyone excited about your book and then let them forget. Once you’ve shown off your gorgeous book, got them excited, you need to keep reminding them it’s coming. Get then to sign up to your news letter, and you may want to have a preorder option.
It can help to set aside a day to come up with content ideas. Then, schedule the content ahead of time so you can space it out and consistently post. Here are some good apps for this:
- Preview: This app is free and enables you to see how your IG content will look on your feed. You can schedule post reminders or to post automatically.
- Facebook Business Suite: It’s free to use and enables you to schedule posts to FB, IG and Twitter.
- Planoly: The free plan enables you to schedule to two platforms for free. I paid for extra features during my launch month in Nov, so I could schedule videos.
- Hootsuite: The free plan enables you to schedule posts to FB, IG and Twitter. You can pay for more features.
- Later: Allows you to schedule posts to Instagram.
- IFTTT: A useful app for sharing posts you posted on one platform, to another.
I also regularly schedule my blog posts. There’s no reason you can’t do your cover reveal on your blog. You want to spread the word so why not on all your social media platforms.
Ocean Heart Gallery
The first image, with the shells, candle and yellow blanket is one I took of my physical book on my bathroom floor. The others, I created in Canva using images from Unsplash.
I added some of these to my Facebook group album and told my street team and blog tour team, they were welcome to use them. Having a bank of images of my book enabled me to keep posting fresh content to IG, in the lead up to my book launch.
I hope you found my cover reveal experience useful. I’d love to hear your thoughts and what worked for you.
[kofi]
Redfae Bookshop is my Affiliate Bookshop.org Shop Link.
You may also enjoy:
The Benefits of Having a Formatter
The Process of Publishing a Novel (Step 1)
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