That was pretty much my opinion, but those I asked were saying it was good, so I had wondered whether I was just being too picky.
In the eBook world a bad cover is a great safety feature. It's like 'do not climb into the lion den' sign at the zoo.
Well I've ALMOST done that before. Thankful enough though, my brother is a brilliant visual artist. He did my last self published ebook.
When I first decided to put my two SF novels on Amazon for Kindle, it was a kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and I basically had no idea what I was doing. I cobbled together a couple covers from photos I'd taken, adding the titles with Photoshop and slapped them up there. Since then, I've invested in better covers, but the slapdash covers really didn't seem to hurt my sales.
I'm surprised. I don't even read a book's blurb if the cover looks slapdash, let alone consider buying it.
I don't know. I was totally inexperienced with self publishing at the time. I had two SF novels I'd written years before and tried unsuccessfully to sell and then stashed away. I heard about self-publishing and figured "Why not?" I priced them at 99 cents because I just wanted to see if anyone was interested in reading them (besides my friends and family) and between the two of them, I sold over 30,000 copies the first year. Like I say, since then I've made more professional looking covers, usually by paying for images on places like iStock.
