This is essentially the only rule, in the sense that, I have not seen a book defy this rule and be successful, unless enormous amounts are spent forcing it to the top of the charts. A cover transmits information to the potential reader, and if you are sending the wrong signal, you will reduce the amount of readers receptive to your book who pick it out, and you will increase the amount of people who pick out your book and put it right back, because it’s not what they were looking for.

Before, when all books were sold in physical bookstores, this was a bad result.

Now, in the era of algorithms, this is absolutely disastrous. When you publish a book on, say, Amazon, (Amazon is a market leader – if a store is not using algorithms such as Amazon’s yet, it will be in the future) it gets a certain amount of free promotion – it might not be much, but you will always get initial sales. Amazon uses these initial sales to figure out what kind of reader to serve this book to in the future, and also to determine if it is a book that will be popular with their readers. Every sale, including direct sales (someone purchasing after clicking a link in your mailing list, for example) or sales made after searching for a specific keyword on Amazon, is of course used to determine your books relevancy and ranking. But, that is only scratching the surface. Amazon measures all user behavior to see what kind of person wants your book, and with an “inaccurate” cover, you will be fighting an uphill battle.

Here are some examples:

Example 1.

Susan searches the Kindle Store for the search term “teen murder mystery” and scrolls through the results. On page five is your book, because you put the term “teen murder mystery” in your keywords and subtitle. She is looking for a dark murder mystery, perhaps in a highschool setting, because she is a fan of Riverdale. Your book, despite being a teen murder mystery, has a bright white cover and two adult detectives on the cover. She fails to notice that you made the “i” in the title look like a knife, or that it says teen murder mystery on the front, because she is casually scrolling, glancing at the cover and title separately as she scrolls.

Repeat this a few times, and unless you have an enormous surge of sales, Amazon will not put your book back in the results for “teen murder mystery.” That is because they have constantly shifting, always working algorithms, and that algorithm can see you have a 0% click through for that term.

Example 2.

You paid an artist to create a stunning, captivating & beautiful cover. Your main character’s name is River, and the fantasy story is about how the evil witch named Winter (the same name as your ex-wife, but we’re going to ignore that for now) will drain the land of all it’s magic, unless River can destroy the magical rock (which is totally not a metaphor for a wedding ring) that she uses to manipulate you- I mean, manipulate the magical realm. So your cover is an immaculate fantasy landscape, showing one half of the cover as summer and the other as winter, with a river flowing from the summer and freezing up completely as it approaches the winter. A great metaphor with real meaning, and readers will notice that the winter freezing the river represents Winter, the witch, taking over River’s life. This is a bad cover, because it only has meaning to you and people who have already read the book. If someone has already read your book, they don’t care about your cover – they care about how good of a book it was! This cover only has meaning to those who already read the book, and does little to signify anything about the book except that is a fantasy book. Do you know how many fantasy books are published every single day? You need to be displaying not just a general concept, but where your book fits in, you should be showing your sub-genre and even your sub-sub-genre.

Countless people are intrigued by your nice cover, and they click to view more. They read the description, maybe read a bit of the preview, but since the cover was generic you cast a very wide net, and a lot of the fish aren’t biting. So, they click in, look around, and click out to continue their search. Now, you’ve destroyed your click-through rate – the percentage of people who buy your book, after checking it out. Now you’re not just hurting your book’s ranking for a specific search term as in example 1, but you’re hurting your ranking for EVERY search term. Amazon wants exactly what you want – to make sales. The algorithm might be difficult to decipher, but the goals of the algorithm are extremely simple – to serve customers books that they will buy. If your book gets 1 sale for every 100 clicks, and another book gets 10 sales for every 100 clicks, which one will the algorithm serve first? If your book has a high sell-through rate, then it’s worth it for Amazon to display your book in a wider set of keyword searches, so that they can keep your book in searches it’s often selected, and remove it from searches where it is not selected. There are way too many books on Amazon for them to just offer your book to customers even if it has a proven history of low sales. It’s not a charity.

So you can see the issue – by casting a wider net, and getting more interested people to click on your book, you are hurting yourself. You should make sure that the right people are clicking on your book, and only when you’re sure you’ve done all you can in that regard, then and only then, should you be worrying about making it as attractive in general as you can.

Of course, if you have an enormous amount of money, you could drive so many sales and inspire so many searches for your novel that Amazon can rank your book for many search terms, but why create an uphill battle for yourself? If you have those kinds of resources, you are probably not designing your own cover anyway, and the experts you are paying should already understand this concept. I say should, because many small publishers seem to barely consider Amazon’s algorithm – if you are outsourcing your book launch, make sure you do your homework.