A cover reveal is a great way of piquing your readers’ or followers’ interest in your book before it is published. It can help to create some “buzz” and get people talking about the book. Cover reveals can give readers a first impression of the book and build anticipation for the book’s publication. It is easy to do and it can be fun.
Purchasing picture books
Adults purchase the most copies of picture books. Moms, dads, and teachers have the most influence when it comes to which books a child will read. Books are mostly impulse purchases in bookstores.
Children ages 5-12 look for books with familiar characters and interesting book covers as their criteria for buying a book. When thinking about your book cover it is important that it appeals to both children and adults. It may be cliche, but we all judge books by their covers.
What goes into a good picture book cover?
There is no easy answer to this question. Taking a look at children’s book covers on Amazon is a great place to begin. For our book we looked at children’s books for ages 6-10. Some things we noted were the colors were more vivid, illustrations were more detailed than those for younger children, and the main characters were the focus of the cover.
Our illustrator was open to sketching three book covers. Each of us came up with one cover design. We used a social media poll to engage our readers and followers. We asked for their help in selecting the sketch for our book cover. The poll indicated that our illustrator’s suggested cover was the one that was most popular with our followers. Our lesson from this is trust your illustrator. Illustrators will create just the right cover for your book and audience. If you want to learn more about working with your illustrator you can here.
Cover Reveal Ideas
One new trend is to create a video for the cover reveal. Cover reveal videos have become very popular and are a fun way to learn about new books. Video cover reveals may increase your number of readers and sales as you share your cover reveal with a new audience. Videos allow the author to play around with the music, sounds and special effects to create a memorable reveal.
There are a number of ways for you to reveal you book cover. You can find several ideas here. Be sure to select a cover reveal that works for you and your audience. We received many positive comments from our followers sharing how much they enjoyed our slow reveal. It was not only fun, but was well received.
Slow Cover Reveal
A slow cover reveal is when you reveal pieces or parts of your book cover. Some authors choose to create a puzzle with their cover and reveal pieces of the puzzle over time. If you have been following me on Instagram or Twitter, you will see that I have revealed one piece of the book cover over several days. The photo above shows the third and final piece that I revealed. This post is the first time that many followers will see the full color cover.
The cover reveal is a great marketing opportunity that you can use to drive engagement and potentially more book sales. Regardless of the one you choose, remember to announce it several times across all of your social media and let people know where and when it will take place. Most importantly, have fun!
What is next?
The last and final thing you should remember is to keep spreading the word with your book cover. Always be sure to let your audience know the date of your book launch. Put the date on your website, Facebook, and social media. Ask your followers to Save the Date!
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Now it is our turn to ask you to Save the Date! Two Wins for Wiley will be launched on October 18th! We hope you will join us on that day and help us to spread the word.