One of the pieces of advice often given to self published authors is to get a good book cover. There are now artists out there who will produce a cover for that work of genius for quite reasonable rates. They can avoid the pitfalls, such as making sure that the images used are not copyrighted to someone else (there are websites of royalty free pictures, too, or images for which the license can be bought very cheaply).
Of course, I discovered this after I'd made the attempt to produce my own book cover - I did know about copyright, which is why Raven's Heirs and Ice Magic have a royalty free picture (of a raven and an ice cliff respectively), and Like Father, Like Daughter has my own photograph of an archway at the ruined monastic buildings just off Widemarsh Street in Hereford.
My skills are extremely basic, and a professional could have done a much better job - but are book covers really so important?
I started to wonder about this when I found two different blogs. One is called Good Show, Sir, and the other is Caustic Cover Critic, and they both deal with images of book covers which they proceed to ridicule - usually with good cause! The thing is, these covers were produced by professionals who were paid for their efforts, and some of them are hilariously bad - yet the books were still bought in at least modest numbers. Some of them were even by quite famous authors - like Michael Moorcock, for instance. A collection of his book covers from the 1970s look like psychedelia gone mad.
So I'm happy to accept that a good cover is an asset to a book's sales, but ultimately I think it's the story that counts, and if an author can get word of mouth recommendations, the cover doesn't matter too much (as long as it doesn't completely suck!)
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