When it comes to the success of
your individual, low content books, as well as the success of ultimately your
entire low content publishing business as a whole design matters too often. I see publishers focus really hard on
the research portion only to turn around and treat design as nothing
more than an afterthought. And then try and remedy their
poor sales with an ad spend. And I've even seen other YouTubers in
the space bragging about how crappy their designs are. And you know, these are usually the same people that
insist that it's absolutely imperative to spend money on ads in order to
create any type of success. Now, while sound research is what's going
to get the eyeballs onto your book to begin with. It's an appealing design. That's going to make the
customer ultimately pull out
their wallet and purchase your books, which is
obviously the ultimate goal. Now at best poor design is
going to minimize your sales and at worst poor design can kill
your sales completely and result in no one ever pulling out
their wallet to buy your book, regardless of how much time and effort
you put into that sound research. Now, you should always be thinking
about ways to elevate your design. It doesn't matter how skilled you
are. If you're just starting out, or if you've got loads of experience, you should always be thinking about how
you can continue to improve your design skills. Improved design is going to make
an impact on your overall sales. So today I want to go through the
top five cover design mistakes that I see out there on a regular basis when
I'm browsing those virtual bookshelves. And we'll talk about what those mistakes
are and how do we can go about avoiding them for your own books. If you're new
here, my name is Rachel Harrison Sund, and I help people to generate passive
income selling journals, planners, notebooks, and more on the Kindle
direct publishing platform. If that sounds good to you, then be sure to hit subscribe
and don't forget to hit the bell. So you can be notified every time
I put out one of these videos, which is every single Monday. So the first mistake is not
considering your target audience. Before you start designing, you need to
know exactly who you're designing for. If you don't know who
you're designing for, that means you're designing for nobody. And that is going to result in
a very boring, bland design. If you have in your mind who
it is you're designing for, then you're going to be able to come
up with a style, a color palette, typography. All of those choices are going to be
geared toward a specific audience, and that is going to help that book
that book's designed to appeal to that audience. So think about it. Is it busy professionals who like
a more clean and modern look? Is it teenage girls who have
more of a whimsical flair? Is it millennial Christians? Is it seniors with more of a traditional
sensibility once you've got that narrowed down? Now, some ideas are going to come to mind
about what types of designs are actually going to appeal to that specific crowd. So let's take a look at a couple of
examples here just to illustrate what I'm talking about. So this first
book here, you can see, this person has not considered
who their audience is. This design is pretty boring,
it's pretty bland. And you know, I really can't think of any specific
group of people that this might appeal to. So again, if it's not talking
to anyone specifically, it's talking to no one. This would be a book that probably nine
people out of 10 will just scroll past. There's nothing really
eye catching about it. And it's not really clear who it's
for. Now, this book on the other hand, it's pretty clear who this book is for. They've been very
intentional in their design. There's a very specific
style that they've used here. And this is clearly aimed
at women who really like colorful floral patterns. Now we
haven't dug super specific into, you know, a very narrow demographic here, but we can at least say with some
certainty that, you know, like I said, this is geared toward women, you know, women who like more
feminine brightly colored floral types of patterns. So I think this is a pretty good
idea or a pretty good example, rather of someone who's really considering
their audience before sitting down and making any design design decisions. So the next design mistake is
poor layout or composition. So when we talk about
layout or composition, what we're talking about is where
elements like imagery or text is actually placed onto the page. So this can include things
like a weak hierarchy. So you really want to consider hierarchy
when you're laying something out. And that just means, you know, what
element do you want to stand out first? Is that a piece of
artwork? Is it the title? Whichever of those elements is that
you want the customer to see first and primarily, that is the element that you want to
stand out from all of the other elements and all of the other elements should
take a backseat and be treated in such a manner where they sit back. So you know, whether it's title or subtitle,
any of these design elements, if they're the same size, then nothing's going to stand out and
you're going to end up with a weak hierarchy. The next thing could just
be too many elements on the page. So things look cluttered. It could be the title and the
subtitle being the same size. These are all ways that contribute
to having a weak hierarchy. So you really want to think about what
element do you want to stand out first? What element do you want
to stand out second, third, and everything should be sitting
back from one another accordingly. Because if you emphasize
everything all at once, then nothing ends up
getting emphasized at all. Other things that can contribute
to a poor composition, are misalignment of certain objects. So I see this so often where the
title is not centered properly, or there are other elements on the
page that you can tell were meant to be centered, but they just haven't been, it can be text place placed over
top of really busy background. So that contributes to the text
becoming nearly illegible because, you know, it might be like a light colored text
over top of her light colored pattern and things just become lost. We could be talking about poor
treatment of a back cover. So some people just leave the back cover
blank and they don't even consider it. You know, what's really nice is pulling whatever
those design elements are that you have used on the cover, pulling
that over to the back cover. So there's some nice continuity
between the front and the back cover and just, you know, generally ignoring the basic
fundamental principles of design. Now, some of these things can
be a little bit tricky to get, get a hang of right away.
If design is new to you, I have left a link in the description
to some further resources that will explain those fundamentals
of design you know, in a, in a really accessible way for you. So I would definitely suggest checking
that out just for some further clarification on some of the
things that I'm talking about here, but let's go ahead and look at a couple
of examples of what I'm talking about here. So let's look at this first
example of a gratitude journal. Alright, so firstly, it's
got some great potential. There's an interesting pattern that's
being used in the background. You know, they've, they've taken out that
bumblebee element brought that forward. That's great. So that there's
some real potential here, but there is a misalignment
of the main design element. You can see that it's
slightly off to the left, so that just throws the whole thing off, makes it look really
unprofessional and amateurish also the text, it just doesn't stand
out against the busy background. It's, you know, it's barely
legible. So this is a problem. And this all contributes to
this book having you know, a less than perfect composition and
a less than perfectly out. Alright, so let's contrast that with
this gratitude journal, this one has got a very beautiful,
very strong composition. It's got a strong hierarchy.
The title stands out, even though this cover has a lot
of different design elements. The title is really standing out here. There's different sizes used for the
title, subtitle and author name. You know, there's the, the main title is treated with
a white over top of all the, you know, the darker
colors in the background. So this all works together to
create a really strong hierarchy. Also they've used a
harmonious color palette here, and it's a really striking cover. It's,
it's really beautiful and they've got, you know, it's a great composition. So the next big mistake
I see is poor typography. So there's a bunch of
different things at play here. This could be fonts that don't
match the style of the book or the artwork or the target audience. It could be just really low quality
free fonts that have really bad kerning between the letters. It could
be poor font, pairing choices, you know, trying to pair two different fonts
that really don't work well together. It could be legibility issues. The text might be too big or too small
so that when someone is scrolling down through the results, you really
can't see what that type says. So those are all, some of the combined issues that
I see when it comes to typography. So again, let's take a look
at a couple of examples. So first this just looks like
a very poor quality free font, and more importantly, here,
it doesn't match the artwork. So the background artwork is
kind of a somber Gothic themed art. You know, it's got kind of a skull in
the background cemetery scene. You know, this kind of creates
a pretty somber vibe yet, the text is this bright white casual sort of irreverent font. So the style of that font really does
not match the style of the artwork. It's complete mismatch. And then also it's really
awkward placement of the text. I can't tell if this was
supposed to be centered. It looks like probably it was
meant to be centered, but it isn't. So it just looks misaligned. So
this would be poor typography. Now let's contrast that
with this teacher planner. So this is a really nice
complimentary font pairing. We have two completely
different fonts here, but they really work in synergy together. They look great together working as a
team, the typography is a good size. It's legible at a small size
out from the background, even though it's got quite
a busy background that
typography really stands out. And the fonts that have been chosen
here really matched the style of the artwork, which is this kind of whimsical
irreverent kind of casual style. So this I think is a
great use of typography. So number four is poor image quality. So this could be anything like
using really cheap and cheesy clip art. It could be
using cheesy photography. It could be unappealing
color palette. So, you know, just using a color palette of colors that
really don't work very well together, either they, they clash or they
just don't match well, or, you know, they're of a similar value. So they vibrate and kind of hurt
the eyes when you look at it, or it can just be as simple as using a
low resolution image that ends up looking pixelated. So again, let's go ahead and we'll look at a couple
of examples. All right. So firstly, we've a graduation guest
book here and the image quality here just, isn't very
good. It's a little bit blurry. It looks a little bit cheesy
and it ends up just in general, looking a little bit cheap. Now, contrast this with this
other graduation guest book, they've used some nice imagery.
It's a good composition. The imagery is crisp and clear
and it works well with the overall design of this book. So the fifth mistake that I
often see is over use of the same design or a lack of differentiation
between all of the books in your catalog. So specifically what I'm talking about
here is when you go to someone's author page and you just see
basically the same book, but just the background
art has been swapped out, whereas maybe the title is the same or
the way that the typography has been treated is exactly the
same across multiple books. And just that background pattern
or artwork has been swapped out, or it can be the reverse of that, where it's the exact same
piece of background artwork. And then they just use that on an
endless supply of different types of low content books. So you're just
seeing a wall of the exact, it looks almost like the exact same book
because the artwork is completely the same in the background. But
the titles are swapped out. So this can be a very confusing
experience for a customer. Who's actually gone to your author page
to check out what other books you have on offer. And, you know, when they go to your author page and
see that they're not really going to be seeing any further variety and you
want them to come to your author page, see a nice variety of original
differentiated books that you can get them interested in. So this just really
goes back to the first point, which is consider your audience. So no matter what type
of book you're designing, if you're sitting down to design a group
of guest books or a group of planners, try to drill down to
specific types of audiences. So you're not just creating a kind
of a one size fits all design, think about, you know, what would this, what kind of design would I
create if I was creating for a teenage girl or a woman in her
thirties or a professional man, when you're thinking about it this way, that's going to inspire you to come
up with completely different designs. Now, having said that, you know, it is okay to reuse certain
designs up to a certain point. If you've got great piece of artwork
that you think would look good on a planner, a journal, a
notebook, go ahead and do that. And just state in your
description. You know, if you like the design of this planner, this exact design is also
available as a notebook or a journal or whatever it is that
can actually be beneficial you, because some people they like
to have matching stationary. So if someone's got this you know, interested in one of your
designs for a planner, they might also be interested in
the same design available as a journal. And that might be something that they
think is great because then they can kind of get the whole set
and everything matches. But the important thing
is to just not overdo it, what you're trying to avoid here is
someone going to your author page and just seeing a total wall of
the exact same design, because that is going to create
confusing customer experience. And it's only going to
cheapen the look of your book catalog as a whole. You
can see as I'm scrolling here, these books really they've used the
same type treatment, almost all of them. It's a really similar color palette. There's not really any differentiation
here where there's just really not a lot of variation. It all
kind of looks the same. So contrast this author page with
the last one we've just looked at, and you can see that even though they
have reused a couple of the layouts here, like these first two,
almost an identical layout, they've used slightly different
colors, but in general, even though the style across all
of these books is very similar. Most of the designs look different. So when you're looking across
all of these designs as a whole, you're seeing a cohesive style, but most of the designs are
actually different and unique. So you're not just being
faced with this wall of books. That looks exactly the same. So tell me, are you guilty of making any of these
book cover design mistakes in your own low content books? If so, tell me which design mistake you're most
guilty of making in the comments below. All right, there, you have it.
I hope you found that useful. If you'd like to find out more about how
you can start generating passive income selling journals, planners, notebooks, and more on the Kindle
direct publishing platform, then be sure to download my free guide
three steps to publishing your first low content book in less than a day. I've left a link to that for
you in the description below, and also feel free to join my free
Facebook group, low content profits. I've linked to that in the
description below as well. Check out these videos next
for more design related, low content book videos.
And if you liked this video, be sure to hit the like button subscribe
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