But you have total control over 80% of your sales, via cover and price point. Price point is more forgiving, and harder to predict. That makes it soggier. A book might do 500 copies in one month at $1.99 and 2,000 the next month at $3.99. You have to experiment, tweak, revise, review, until you find a groove for that title.
But cover? That's binary. A cover is either a cover or it isn't. It's very likely that yours... isn't. Let's take a look at some top-selling genre fiction (YA, fantasy, sci-fi) kindle editions at amazon.
Buyers judge books by their covers; it's all they have to go on.
COLOUR: Jewel tones. Notice that? Not "blue" or "red" or "green." But sapphire, ruby, emerald.
VIGNETTE: Most get darker around the edges (or at least one side), to tell you to ignore the images next to the cover, and draw the eye to the center.
TYPE: Look how little variation there is here. Trajan is the big winner by a huge margin, often with accentuated caps or letterspaced (L I K E T H I S). For sans-serif faces, long, narrow, condensed and closely set.
CONTRAST: Overwhelmingly, white or gold type set on a darker background.
FULL-BLEED: Image goes all the way to the edge, all 'round. It's not bordered, it's not in a box, it's not with a solid band of colour on top. In one example above, there's a semi-transparent box, in the same tones as the illustration, to give the white type some contrast.
CASE: Upper. I don't see any mixed upper and lower here.
MORE: You can't yet put "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER" above your title, but you can likely put "A MAIN CHARACTER NOVEL" or "BY THE AUTHOR OF SOME OTHER BOOK". Sometimes you can throw in a one or two line slug "Oh my God... unbelievable... I couldn't put it down...amazing" - Some Writer Friend, author of Yet Another Book. There shouldn't be very much of this, but you can see where it goes from the samples above and how much there should be of it.
The cruel, ugly reality here is that if your cover doesn't look like this, it won't sell the way it should. This is what a book cover is: it's unforgiving, it's inflexible, it's binary. And it makes all the difference in the world.
There's no way to do this in Word. There's no way to do this with online cover generators – although by using the rules above you can probably get pretty close. You just need to really pay attention, and even if you hire a cover designer, keep asking yourself, and others around you, "Does it look like one of these?" Because it has to.
