The old saw goes something like this: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Now I’m not one to question your elementary school English teacher’s wisdom (though the original expression was actually “You can’t judge a book by its binding”). I get it.
But when it comes to selling your book, covers are tremendously important. As Alan Powers points out in his excellent treatment Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design, book covers in the 20th century transformed from being a mere “functional layer protecting the fragile paper inside, into a sophisticated visual tableau through which the author’s message is interpreted and communicated.”
Award-winning illustrator and cartoonist Chris Ware expands on this notion in the forward to Penguin 75, a celebratory look at book covers on the occasion of the Penguin Group’s 75th anniversary. According to Ware, “the book cover has evolved from a simple protective wrapper into something of a contemporary striptease between author and reader, both as a means of drawing attention to and selling the book, or amplifying and even extending the book itself into the reader’s mind and fingertips.”
And what’s true for print is even more so for ebooks. Here’s why.
All ebookstores display cover images when showing search results, and then feature covers prominently again when presenting the book’s page. Aside from your book’s title, the cover is where you get a chance to make that all-important first impression.
An uninspiring cover design, or worse no cover image at all, suggests an incomplete effort on your part, potentially bringing the quality, and even the seriousness, of the entire work into question. This might seem unfair, but remember that notwithstanding the reviews that might accompany your book, along with the usually-skimpy sample that takes time to download, your audience has comparatively little information on which to base their purchasing decision.
Adding Photos and Images
Cover design is a sophisticated subject that would require much more time and space than we have here. However, one option to spruce up a cover is to add a photo or some other type of image. This makes good sense since images are often great at catching our attention and can elicit emotion to strengthen the title of a book.
You have several options when it comes to adding images to your book cover, including the following:
- Create the photo or image
- License an image from an individual or service
- Hire someone to create an image for you
- Use a Creative Commons image
- Use an image that is in the public domain
Creating an Image
Using a photo or image that you have created yourself is an obvious option, and a good choice in certain circumstances. The advantage, of course, is that as the creator of the image, you are automatically assigned copyright to the work and are free to use it as you choose (within certain legal limits related to celebrity images, implicit endorsements, and perhaps even slander or libel).
In other cases, however, creating an image yourself might not be the best option, or even an option at all. The image you need might be halfway around the globe, or could be of a fantasy world that only an artist can create.
In addition, unless you are a skilled artist or photographer, your image might come across as looking amateurish and unprofessional. Using a bad image (unless your cover is playfully meant to look like a spoof), is actually worse than using no image at all.
Thankfully you have other options. Read on.
Licensing an Image
A popular option for people who need graphics quickly is to license images. The good news is that there are now literally dozens of stock photo and image libraries available on the Web, ranging from very pricey to unbelievably inexpensive.
For instance, some of the most popular stock libraries include iStockPhoto (www.istockphoto.com), fotolia (www.fotolia.com), and Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com), among others. These sites also license graphic illustrations and videos. With so many services actively competing against each other, the chance of finding the image you need at a reasonable price is quite good.
When licensing a photo or a piece of graphic art, you have two options: rights managed or royalty free. Rights managed means that the owner, or assigned agent of the owner, licenses the right for you to use an image for a specific purpose (and in certain cases, for a specific time period or geographic market).
For example, you might license a photo of fog rolling through the Golden Gate into San Francisco for the cover of your travel book, for sale in North America. This means that you can use the image on your cover (and nowhere else), and only for ebooks that you sell in North America.
A royalty free license, on the other hand, generally allows you to use the image as you choose, for as long as you want, and typically with few of the restrictions of rights managed images. Royalty-free images are also usually less expensive often available on DVD collections or through online services.
If rights managed images are more expensive and come with greater restrictions than royalty-free images, why would you ever choose the former? The simple answer involves quality and exclusivity. Rights managed images are often, but not always, of higher quality. But, more importantly, rights managed works often offer the option to exclusively use an image in a specified market.
This means that if you are convinced that your book is headed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, you can license a rights managed image that only you can use for a specified time (perhaps a year or two) in your chosen market (say North America and Europe).
With this license you are guaranteed that the same image will not appear on the cover of a competing book, for example, or as part of a spoof campaign (or other type of distraction).
Most large publishers have traditionally used only rights managed images on their covers. However, as the lifespan of certain types of books continue to shrink, and with the relative glut of images now available on the Internet, even some traditional publishers have opted for using less expensive and more generally-available images.
Hiring Someone to Create an Image
There are many talented artists and photographers available, and thanks to the Internet, it’s easier than ever to find someone who is available to help. You should be aware of one issue, however, before engaging an artist to work with you.
Most professional photographers, and some artists, earn their livelihood by creating images that they then license to clients instead of selling the images outright. For example, if you hire a professional photographer to photograph a sunset from the coast, most photographers will insist on retaining ownership of the photograph and only licensing the image to you.
They do this because the typical one-time income from a photo shoot is not sufficient to maintain a professional business. These artists prefer to retain rights to their creative efforts, allowing them to leverage their talents by re-licensing the image at a future date.
These same photographers can be convinced to sell the rights to the images outright, transferring ownership to you. But, in all cases, this will likely involve significantly more money changing hands.
Another option is to create what is often called a work-for-hire contract or agreement, stipulating in writing that the artist works directly for you and automatically transfers ownership and rights to created works. Most professional photographers dislike this type of relationship, especially since a number of larger media outlets have started strong-arming photographers to sign work-for-hire contracts.
Nonprofessional photographers, or people who do photography on the side, are less likely to worry about ownership, and will likely assume a work-for-hire arrangement by default. In either case, you need to be aware of these practices in the industry and be prepared to plan and make arrangements accordingly.
Adopting a Creative Option
In the past decade, a new option for licensing photos and images has appeared on the scene. Known as Creative Commons, the movement looks to expand on the notion of copyright by allowing copyright owners to specify upfront exactly how others can use their creative work, and what they expect in return.
For example, creators of an image can stipulate in advance that others can only use their work if they follow one or more of the following conditions:
- Attribution, which requires attribution to the creator
- Share Alike, which allows people to create derivative works as long as they make their derivatives available in the same fashion as the original
- Non-Commercial, which stipulates that the work cannot be used for commercial purposes
- No Derivative Works, which allows only the original to be used, but no derivatives can be created
These conditions are conveniently grouped into six major licenses with names such as Attribution Share Alike or Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives, followed by an easy-to-decipher coding system such as CC-BY and CC-BY-NC-ND for the two earlier examples respectively.
Creative Commons was started by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred in 2001, and the photo-sharing service Flickr, as one example, already lists over 300 million works licensed using the system.
From your perspective as an author and publisher, this means that you can use any of these licensed images without having to contact the creator, request any type of explicit approval, or offer any form of payment, as long as you abide by the conditions of the license (identified clearly using the coding system).
With the number of works likely approaching over half a billion or more by now, this presents an exciting, low-cost, creative and cooperative approach to building your work through the gracious help of others.
What You Should Absolutely NEVER Do
Whatever path you choose, there is one thing that you should absolutely never do under any circumstances: Do not use any image or other work for which you have not secured the appropriate rights.
Unless the image is in the public domain, and clearly marked as such, every image that you will encounter is copyrighted by someone. Even if the image has appeared in thousands of email messages and on countless blog postings, the rights to every image is legally owned by someone (images can become legally orphaned, meaning that the copyright owner cannot be found, but this is a tricky area that is still being debated).
Some ebookstores remind you of this fact before you publish your book, however, it just makes good business sense to be aware and do the right thing. Mistakes, intentional or otherwise, can be costly when you are discovered.
Our Recommendation
Whether you choose to do it yourself, or decide to go with one of the many free or nearly-free licensing options, it’s never been easier and more cost-effective to add engaging images to your book covers. Of course, not all books benefit from adding a photo, and even a great image requires competent cover design. But if an image is what you feel you need, your options are vast and truly limited only by your time and creativity.
Featured image Creative Commons licensed by HalfLightPress.