Can you sell a book by it’s cover?

A newbie author dives into self publishing

I’ve written several picture book manuscripts. I love the idea of mixing art and story, but I never knew exactly what to do with them. I don’t have the patience for traditional publishing, but the idea of paying for an illustrator and formatting for self-publishing was overwhelming to me. I don’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to pay an illustrator right now, and even if I did, would I know how to format and self-publish?

Can I make my own illustrations?

I decided to take a creative leap and try illustrating one of my books myself. The book I picked wasn’t my favorite idea. I picked the one that I felt like I had some chance of effectively illustrating. The book is about backpacking, which is pretty concrete. The vision I had was collage and here’s the first page I did:

I started with images that involved only inanimate objects and it proved to me I could make pictures that actually looked like something. Proof of concept!

But can I make people?

My next step was collaging some figures of people. In my original vision, the characters were teddy bears, but I ended up doing humans instead. Here’s my first image with humans:

I wanted to make the cover something super cool, but I was learning I needed to leave space on each page for text, so when I made the cover, I was careful to leave space on the front side for the title and my name in a large font. Here’s the cover:

I really liked the cover image. I liked how the symbolic boot looked and I liked the sunrise. I liked this image so much I used it for a spread inside the book too.

As a person completely new to formatting a book, I used Shutterfly to create a mock up of my book design. Then, once I knew what I was going for, I used Canva to design the high quality PDF for uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing.

I was so incredibly excited when my first proofs arrived. Some of the collage textures actually look more visually interesting in the book than they do in real life. Here’s a photo of the proof copy of my book:

I gave a few early copies to my close family members, but I didn’t announce the book anywhere. This proof copy sat staring at me on my dresser.

And this is the bad news – The cover just didn’t feel quite right. I made this mock up to announce my book on social media and I thought why does the back cover look more visually interesting than the back?

The book cover is just so grey and black and neutral. It’s literally one of the least interesting pages in the book. I asked myself does this cover sell the book and the answer was no. After all my anxiety around making people, the people in the book became my favorite part of the images.

This cover has no people!

I decided I would go back to the cover page and add a little girl. I ended up changing the disembodied boot to a leg and a boot because I thought it clashed with the full person. It also meant the little girl wasn’t hiking alone. Maybe the leg is her mom.

Here’s an action shot of me redoing the cover collage:

After I added a little collage person to the cover, I really feel like what you see on the cover is a taste of what you get inside. When a copy of the new and improved book with the new and improved cover arrived, I pulled it out of the Amazon envelope and showed my daughter, who hadn’t seen the new images.

She literally squealed, “There’s a kid!”

That right there was the reaction I wanted from my cover.

Are you interested in peer coaching and accountability for your creative projects, like the one I describe above? Join us at the Creative Collaborative FB group!

Here’s the Amazon listing for the book I made.