What a cover cannot fix
We make cover tools, so take this in the spirit it is offered: a new cover is the most common wasted month in self-publishing.
The job of a cover is narrow and it is real. In about one second, at about the size of a postage stamp, it makes the right reader stop. It does that well or badly, and when it does it badly, nothing else about your book ever gets a chance. Every other guide in this section is about doing it well.
But the cover's work ends at the click. What happens after the click is somebody else's department, and redesigning the cover will not staff it.
Six things a cover cannot fix
A blurb that does not say what the book is. The cover earns the look; the description closes the sale. A blurb that opens on backstory, hedges the genre, or summarizes the plot instead of pitching it loses readers the cover already won — quietly, with no signal that anything went wrong. See How to write a blurb that sells the book.
The wrong category. A category is the room your book stands in. File a cozy mystery under thrillers and a perfectly good cozy cover gets shown to readers it was never designed for. They do not click, because it is not their kind of book. Nothing is wrong with the cover; it is being shown to strangers. Categories and keywords, without the folklore.
An interior that looks unformatted. The store's preview is the second thing a browser sees, usually within seconds of the first. A manuscript pasted out of Word — every paragraph indented including the ones after a break, chapter openings that are just bigger text, blank lines doing the work of spacing — reads as unfinished, and readers close the preview. How to format a book interior.
A price out of step with the category. Price is read as a claim about what the book is, not only what it costs. A reader who has been buying books like yours at one price has a range in mind before they look, and a number outside it changes what they think they are looking at. Pricing a self-published book.
A book that needed another editing pass. A cover gets a stranger to open the sample. The sample is the book. Nothing on the front survives a run of reviews saying it needed a proofread. The editing passes that have to happen before typesetting.
An audience that is not there. Sometimes there is no shelf. If you cannot name five books your reader already bought and liked, the problem is not presentation — the cover is being asked to create demand, which is the one thing it has never done. Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on.
In the tools. The cover, the interior and the ebook come out of one project, so fixing the stage that is actually broken does not mean rebuilding the others — change the blurb on the back, reset the interior, re-export, and the spine follows the new page count. Start a book → · about the tools
The sequence to run when sales are slow
Four stages, in order. Each one has something you can look at, and each one points at a different fix.
1. Are people seeing it? Impressions. If your book is being shown a few hundred times a month, nothing downstream is measurable and no design decision is provable. This is a visibility problem — categories, keywords, the title and subtitle a search can match, a list to announce to, advertising if you choose to. Fix this before you interpret anything below it, because small numbers lie. See Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book.
2. Are they clicking? This is the cover's stage, together with the title and the price stamp beside it. Thousands of impressions and almost no clicks is the one result that genuinely implicates the cover. Clicks arriving normally means the cover is working, whatever you personally think of it.
3. Are they buying after clicking? They liked the cover enough to open the page, and then left. The cover is exonerated. The suspects are the blurb, the preview, the price, the review count, and the sample's first two pages — in roughly that order of how often they are the culprit.
4. Are they finishing, and buying the next one? Readers bought it, and the second book or the also-by list sees nothing. That is the book itself, or the back matter not asking. See The back of the book is where your next sale is.
Most authors skip straight to stage two because it is the stage with a picture. It is also the only stage where the fix costs money.
When the cover really is the problem
It is usually obvious, and the test is free.
Open your book's real sub-category, take the top twenty covers as a grid at the size the store displays them, and drop yours in. Do not zoom. If the title is a gray smudge, if the whole thing reads as a different genre than its neighbors, if it is the one that looks like a stock photo with a word on it — you have your answer, and you did not need a month of analytics to get it.
If it sits in that grid looking like a neighbor, the cover is doing its job, and the fix is at stage one, three or four. The thumbnail test has the mechanics, and When to redo a cover, and when to leave it alone covers the cases where a redesign genuinely pays.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Check the listing the way a stranger would · More: The thumbnail test · Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on · When to redo a cover, and when to leave it alone