In America, at least, once you plunge into the writing/publishing world, your name and contact information, being the commodities they naturally are, appear instantly on the auction block, resulting in deluge of requests to relieve you of what money you might have.  Gee, I can publish my book for only $9.53 a copy.  Wow!  (Or, I can e-publish it for nothing.)  Some of these tantalizing postcards remind me of those folks eager to renew your domain name for a year for only $29.95 when you can do it yourself for $10.  I registered the domain names myself in the first place, so why do they think I want to pay somebody else to renew them at three times a cost?  There is a whole rant here about business based on consumer ignorance, but I'll leave that for another time.

Back to the topic at hand, the other day, I received this enticing offer, with identifying features removed to protect the perpetrator from embarrassment.  They'll be glad to design book covers guaranteed to increase my sales, for a nominal amount they are afraid to even print on the ad.  I have to call them.  Now, one has to bear in mind that when advancing a sales pitch, one normally wants to forward samples of their very best work.  And that has me worried, because these three covers, in one way or another, suck.  Allow me to explain why.

1. The graphics are amateurish.  Understand, that I am not a graphics artist, by either training or profession, but I can do better.  These are what I call "coloring book" graphics.  Someone sat done with CorelDraw for 10 minutes, threw together some basic shapes, added some text, and called them covers.  Only the middle cover (call it #2) is interesting at all, and then just barely.

2. Illegible as thumbnails.  Over half of all books sold today are via the Internet, so a writer needs a cover that not only looks good on the shelf, but that looks good and conveys the message when it's reduced to 150 screen pixels high.  On the original postcard, much of the writing is barely legible, some of it on #1 not legible at all, and the images are larger than 150 pixels in the original mailing  At thumbnail size, neither #1 nor #3 would be intelligible even to an eagle, which, despite higher visual acuity than humans, is still unable to process information into an image that wasn't there to begin with.

3. There is the matter of text backgrounds.  Quick!  In five seconds or less, what is the title of #2?  At higher resolution, it is pretty legible against that abstract clock representing 15 minutes, but even scanned for this post, parts of it disappear.  Number 3 is worse.  Who puts orange text against a yellow background and expects anyone to read it, even if it's not reduced?  No no no no no!  This is just not going to work.

For comparison, here's the last cover I did, for my epic fantasy novel, at reduced thumbnail size.  I'm quite happy with it, and had I not already read it a dozen times, it seems effective enough to encourage me to buy it.  (If you think differently, that's OK.)  No cut-and-paste graphics.  In fact, the raw graphic took nearly an hour to render at the 1562x2500 resolution Amazon recommends, so each time I found a subtle flaw and had to go back and do it again, it was more than a little annoying.  The main title and byline stand out well.  The series title is haloed in black to guarantee it separates from the similarly colored series title banner.  And, of course, it's all legible as a thumbnail.

Addendum: I did redo this cover.  It's much better now.

One has to wonder about how an allegedly professional book-cover-creating concern can flub things up so much. Well, let me tell you.  This is not a publisher.  A real hard-copy publisher has a vested interest in creating an effective cover, because the better the cover, the more they sell, and the more money you make.  Companies such as this one, however, which shall remain nameless, have no such interest, since they don't directly make money from book sales.  They make money from convincing the writer that they can produce compelling covers.  Once they have your money, the only way to enhance profitability is to reduce production costs.

It might be that they hire high school graphics class interns to sit at CorelDraw and edit some templates for $7.25 an hour.  In fact, the lower paid their interns, and the less time they spend on each cover, the more profitable their efforts are.  To spend the time to do some really professional-grade graphics would cut into their profit margins so quickly that the guilty intern would probably be fired on the spot.

Note that I am not trying to discourage writers from getting help from the artistically skilled in producing book covers.  In fact, I'd generally recommend it.  But throw any of these postcards you get in the mail into the recycling bin as fast as you can run there.  The Internet is full of starving artists who can do a better job than these three samples, and probably at lower cost, although I haven't called that number to find out exactly how badly they wanted to bleed me.  They do have to pay for all those bulk mailings, after all.

Instead, start with DeviantArt.com and put out a request.  If that fails, go to Google.  I've seen so-called amateur artwork that is breathtakingly spectacular, and sure to draw more attention to a work than anything stamped out by one of these assembly line companies.  Unless they are Steven King or J. K. Rowling, writers are starving, too.  Use your resources wisely.

Another addendum: I now do book covers.