Making an Ebook Cover

I recently got tired of readers telling me they nearly didn't purchase my book, Touching Spirits, the Mayan Case, because it sounded like a new age book.

I didn't want anything hindering sales with my action/suspense novel, so I decided to not only change the title, but the cover as well. This led to two weeks of putting my graphic designer through hell, changing my mind, changing fonts, colors, and then chucking the entire idea and beginning anew.

This is where we were when I decided that in thumbnail size the cover was mostly empty space. The gun and badge are merely specks that small. This is not a meaningless consideration. 99.99% of potential buyers on Amazon will first see the cover that size. If you don't have something to make them stop and click to see it larger, they are gone, and so is a sale. So, I went back to the designer.








This is what the designer came up with--making the gun and badge larger. She zoomed in on them. But still it bothered me. I was irritable and the fiance felt it. That night she took me to Barnes & Noble's (known in my family as Barney's Noddles because of a four-year-old's mistake), and we ravished the suspense section of the book store. The help quietly moved away as we took stacks of books from their homes and laid them on the floor, so we could stand back and gawk. It worked. I came up with an idea.

And here we are ....  It is not the final, but I feel much better about it than the other layout or design. We are going to enlarge the knife, add some dripping blood, so that it becomes the focal point, and most likely add a background color. In general, we'll just play with it for a while until it pops. When the knife and the blood are larger, they will be clearly visible in thumbnail size.
I thought I'd throw this one in for a laugh. My designer threw everything in the refrigerator together to make this tasty casserole of a cover. 'The Frog Ruin.'