How important is artwork in marketing materials? I accidentally stumbled into a site that offers access to what they claim is a wide variety of marketing images into which you can have your book cover inserted, for use in advertising, marketing, and promotions. The price doesn't look prohibitive but ... how useful would this material be? https://www.adazing.com/mock-download/?coverid=three-10722631637199119 If anyone can offer feedback, especially with respect to this site, I would greatly appreciate it.
Hello. Think of it less as artwork and more as visual communication, i.e. important in promotion but not as important as aiming the right book at the right audience in the first place. The site looks like affiliate nonsense, conceived by parasites lacking the imagination to create real value for writers — preferring instead to exploit their desire to succeed. Like the plague, best avoided.
That website looks like a scam. Also, I would agree with pyro that it's not really appropriate to call that artwork, its promotional ads. If you want images like that to post to social media or use to run ads, then you can either learn how to do this yourself or find a graphic designer to do it for you (usually the same person who made your cover). If you want to learn then what you need is two things. You need [stock] photos and you need a photo editing software like Canva, Photoshop, Affinity, etc. Canva is generally what a lot of beginners use since its free and apparently easy to use (I have no experience with it personally). Depositphotos is a good place to get stock photos. You could look up something like "man holding book" and go from there. Sometimes the search process is a little tedious but there are a lot of photos so you should be able to find options. Anyway, it is an important thing if you use social media. For instance, when building up hype for the release of your book you might want to regularly post promo images on instagram. A lot of people will do quotes on a stock image, then the image of their book on a tablet in the corner or something like that. Some people will post images where someone is just holding their book because its aesthetically nice and good pictures attract attention and attract the appropriate readers since the picture should appeal to your readers. The examples on the website you showed would likely not draw a lot of people in, mostly because they have zero personality. They look like the type of photos you see on company websites. They don't need to be fancy but they need to have personality so that it appeals to your specific reader base. Go on instagram and search for something like #horrorbooks or #fantasybooks. You will see a bunch of pictures from readers and companies that have stylized pictures and ad images. Start following similar authors to yourself, see what they do, what is successful for them, and mimic it. Try out some things and see what gets better feedback in the form of "likes" and comments.
Simply get your book cover design and use one of those free DIY mockup sites. You're essentially paying for something that's basically free with a single google search. I personally use this site to help get a good feel for how my book covers look: https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/ If you pay for something custom and unique for your promotions, then it might be worth the trouble. But never pay if it's just to slap your design on a generic template.