New cover sales (update)
Well, I updated the covers to Powerless and Killing Gods back in August and did a short blog post then about the immediate increase in sales. The proof of the pudding would be if the sales stayed elevated, or dropped back down again after I finished promoting Higgs & Soap.
Well, it’s been a couple of months now, and I’m happy to say that sales are still up! I had been selling, on average, 2 copies of Powerless and 1 copy of Killing Gods per week. Now it’s 6 and 3 respectively. Yes, I’m not outselling James Patterson yet, but that’s a big jump with no other change than just the cover.
Just goes to show how much a cover alone impacts sales. It is, after all, the first thing a potential customer sees of your work. Now I know a lot of writers will be gnashing their teeth at this thought, muttering, “But it’s about the words! What about my beautiful words?”, while cursing the dominance of our visual sense. But the fact is, the cover is the very first thing people see of your book, whether it’s on the Amazon or iTunes website or on their local Waterstones’ bookshelf (one day… one day…). It has to grab their attention. Your words can’t do that from a distance, no matter how much we would love them to.
Then the second thing that grabs their attention is the blurb on the back. When I changed the covers, I took the opportunity to update these too. I made them shorter, snappier and more dramatic, to give the customer an idea of the feeling of the book inside. Whether this has helped I can’t say, but copywriting (that is, writing copy for adverts, which is what the back of your book essentially is) is a very different beast to creative writing, and if you’re a self-pub doing everything yourself like I am, you can’t dive into writing the blurb with the same frame of mind as the insides.
But so far it seems as if I’ve done something right, which means the only thing remaining is to start writing the next book!
Tony.
POWERLESS – Amazon UK, Amazon US, Smashwords, iTunes UK, iTunes US, Barnes & Noble, Nook, DriveThruFiction
KILLING GODS – Amazon UK, Amazon US, Smashwords, iTunes UK, iTunes US, Barnes & Noble, Nook, DriveThruFiction
