The cover of your book plays many crucial roles in the marketing of your book. But for many people, the first time they’ll see the cover is in a listing online, an Amazon page, or an email.
This makes the representation of your cover in electronic form even more important than ever. And if you are producing ebooks, this is the only format in which the book exists.
Your Cover’s Modeling Career
Rather than the traditional, flat, 2-dimensional image of the book cover as on Amazon pages, many marketers use 3-dimensional renderings of their books. I have to admit I find these very seductive.
Although the flat cover is easier to read, truer to the design intent, and displays typography much better, there is something about the “bookiness” of these images, the very solid feeling of dimensionality that captures my attention, and makes me think of the book as something with a physical reality, something I could hold in my hand.
These images are can be produced by creating 3D models in Adobe Photoshop CS4
and putting “skins” on the models for different covers, or they can be created by dedicated rendering software.
Case Study
Take a look at these two versions of the cover of Body Types:
Body Types 2D
Body Types 3D
To me, the 3D rendering really pulls me in, I want to own the book.
I’ve seen people claim that this type of graphic will outsell the 2D version by 30%. However, I’ve never seen a study cited to prove this, so I consider it an unreliable and therefore meaningless statistic. But based on my own reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
What’s your reaction to these two covers? Which one “sells” better for you?
