Episode 216: 7 Things Not To Put On A Book Cover

The Pulp Writer Show

In this week's episode, I take a look at 7 things you should not put on a book cover, and also discuss how I used to write tech nonfiction.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 216 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 30th, 2024, and today we're considering seven things that you should not put on your book cover. We’ll also talk a little bit about how I used to write tech books and have Question of the Week. Last week we also had a bit of a problem with the microphone levels. Hopefully that should now be adjusted and the sound should not be bouncing around randomly throughout the episode.

So first up, updates on my writing progress. I am currently done with the rough draft of Shield of Conquest, 97,500 words written in 21 days. Right now, I'm writing a companion short story, The First Command. That will be a short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Shield of Conquest comes out, hopefully sometime in September. I'm also 40,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs, which will be the next main project after Shield of Conquest is out. I’m 10,000 words into Cloak of Titans, which hopefully will be around November.

In audiobook news, the recording for Half-Orc Paladin is done. That will be excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. And if all goes well, that should wend its way through the various audiobook stores and be available soon.

00:01:19 Question of the Week

Now let's do Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week’s question: what is your favorite movie in the fantasy genre? No wrong answers obviously, but I think it's an interesting question because I suspect fantasy is a lot harder as a genre to bring to film than police procedurals or romantic comedies. Quite a few responses for this one.

Mary says: The Princess Bride.

Justin says: The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in a category by itself. A faithful (given the constraints) adaptation of the greatest fantasy story of all time. Conan is very good, but The Princess Bride is what I watch over and over again.

Barbara says: Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. I know it's animated, but I watch it every chance I get. Even hunted down the soundtrack. It was our go to entertainment when my husband and I were dating and right after we were married.

William says: Watching Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits as a child was an impactful experience for me. Personally, I don't really see the need to adapt perfectly good books into movies where you can make a perfectly good original movie instead like Star Wars.

Martin says: Lord of the Rings has an epic quality about it and has everything. One of my favorite fantasy films is Stardust. It's a great journey for the characters involved and has a wonderful mix of magic and action.

Jenny says: Legend and Labyrinth are iconic to me and Dark Crystal. Lord of the Rings is epic though, I agree.

A different Barbara says: Got to be Labyrinth. Bowie was spectacular. Not a fan of Lord of the Rings.

Gary says: Lord of the Rings is pretty obvious, but I've always liked Time Bandits.

BV says: Hand down, Lord of the Rings and the upcoming movie Shield Knight (which is not terribly likely).

Bonnie says: Willow is number one, then the original Dune. Yeah, I know-quite the spectrum.

Juana says: Lord of the Rings and Fantastic Voyage.

David says: Don't forget Krull.

Tom says: Lord of the Rings, then Stardust. Rewatched those so many times.

AL says: Willow also had a terrible plot. I think my second choice would be Bright, lol. And then the last Dungeons and Dragons movie.

Jeanne says: Without question, Lord of the Rings.

Darla says: Geez people, every movie you mentioned makes me want to see them again. There are so many good and not so good fantasy movies. I would say Lord of the Rings plus Rings of Power on Amazon. A really old movie from my brain is Scanners. Although the acting was totally terrible, the concept was intriguing.

And finally, Pippa says: Lord of the Rings, then Willow.

So yeah, we can see from those answers that Lord of the Rings is definitely the category winner, which agrees with my own assessment. For myself, I think the overwhelming answer would have to be Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. In my opinion, and your opinion may vary, The Lord of the Rings movie set the bar very high, so the trilogy is kind of in its own category. You can watch them 20 years later and they hold up well in a way a lot of stuff from 20 years ago does not.

But with that said, I think my second favorite fantasy film would be the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian, since it does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original stories and the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is superb. The Anvil of Crom track is excellent. Also, James Earl Jones plays an evil sorcerer/cult leader named Thulsa Doom, which is of course excellent, although after reading all the comments and thinking about it, I think Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from 2023 would be tied with Conan the Barbarian in my second place fantasy film.

00:04:38 Reflections on Writing Tech Books

Now onto a slightly different topic, how I used to write tech books. I can always tell when the school year starts because suddenly I have numerous orders for the paperback copies of the Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and the Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide. This happens because some professors have recommended them for their classes because the books are one- low cost and two- a good introduction to the topic. If you've only discovered my writing recently, and by recently I mean within the last six years or so, you might not know this, but I used to do a lot of tech writing. That was in fact my first successful attempt at writing from the Internet, tech blogging back in the second half of the 2000s. When I started self-publishing in 2011, I also wrote a bunch of tech books and Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide are definitely the most successful of them. Around 2018/early 2019 I stopped tech writing due to lack of time and the fact that fiction turned out to be much more lucrative.

That said, I occasionally get snide remarks and people saying well, why paid $0.99 for an ebook? All this information is available for free on the Internet or YouTube. That is true. However, it overlooks the fact that people learn information in different ways. For some people, having the information laid out step by step in a book is the best introduction to the topic. And the books are intended for absolute beginners. Part of the experience of being an absolute beginner is that you don't even know the proper questions to ask, which means it's hard to find research. It's hard to research and find relevant information on the Internet. It's said that experts know what they don't know. If you're a beginner, you don't even know what you don't know yet. That means you don't know what to Google or look for on YouTube. Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide were intended to give people a good beginning foundation on the topic.

And since the books have been out for 12 years, I think I've achieved that achieved that goal. I've gotten many emails from people who found themselves suddenly forced to use Linux. My favorite was from a teacher who unexpectedly found himself teaching a high school computer science class one week before it actually began. They said that the book helped them come to grips with the Linux Command Line. I'm glad that was helpful. I'm glad that the book has helped people, which is why I've kept them at $0.99 for over a decade now. And if you are learning command line for the first time and you're one of the people who bought the book recently, I hope it is helpful.

00:07:00 Main Topic: 7 Things You Shouldn’t Put on Your Book Cover

Our main topic this week is seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. We have talked a lot about book cover design and related topics on this podcast so I thought would be a good idea to take a look at seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. It is a delicate balance to get a cover that is eye-catching and represents what you want people to know about your book without being either offensive or boring. Studying other covers in your genre is a great start for learning how to make successful covers and to match what people expect to see on a cover.

Amazon has a broad “material we deem inappropriate or offensive” sentence in its guidance about inappropriate covers. So how do you know what makes for an inappropriate cover? As a general rule, over my book covers I've avoided any sort of nudity and no weapons pointed at the reader. If you have weapons on your cover, such as swords or guns or whatever, they should not be pointed at the reader. More specific questions you can ask yourself about whether something is inappropriate for book cover are: would someone be embarrassed or nervous to be seen with this book cover on the subway? Thanks to ereaders and phones, you can read whatever you want on the subway or the bus without people knowing what you're reading but if you have a paper book, would you be embarrassed to be seen with this cover in public? Would you have to hide this cover from a grandparent, a former teacher, or a teenager? Is this the kind of cover you would not want them to see? Would a newspaper be uncomfortable printing this cover as part of a story and would a local bookstore not be excited to have this cover in their window for the entire community to see? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you may want to rethink your book cover. And now on to our actual list of seven things you should not put on your book cover.

#1: Awards that no one has heard of or bestseller lists besides the New York Times. If your book has won an award that isn't super well known like the Hugo or the National Book Award or the Edgar, etcetera, it shouldn't take up real estate on your cover. It's definitely not worth chasing some of those random tiny book awards that focus on Indies, some of which are more sketchy than others, just to have a shiny gold metal on your cover. If people don't know the award, it's at best confusing and at worst makes it look like the book couldn't win a real award. New York Times is the only bestseller list the average reader would care about, maybe USA Today if you were on it before it ended. And similarly, advertising your Amazon ranking on your cover is cringey and looks desperate, so unless you've won a prestigious award that people who are outside the book world would have heard of, it's probably a good idea to not put any awards on your book cover.

#2: Low resolution images and text and font that can't be read in thumbnail. Both too small and too stylized are problems. Test out your thumbnail on both color and an E Ink screens because you want it to be comprehensible and legible in both formats in thumbnail. Low resolution or pixelated images make your book look cheap and low effort, which will be especially noticeable and regrettable in print versions. Never zoom into a JPEG unless the JPEG is high enough resolution to support it. In any kind of photo editing or cover design, you want to work with the highest resolution photos possible because there naturally are more pixels to work with, and then you can do more things with it or zoom in a bit without it becoming appearing pixelated, which is not possible with low resolution images. So you'll want to avoid those for your book cover.

#3 of things you should not put on your book cover are images you don't own or AI generated images. Copyright matters. If you don't own the image or a license to use it, you're infringing on someone’s copyright and they can respond legally or send take down notices to the places where your book is sold. Be careful about using Creative Commons sites, since copyrighted work frequently ends up on those sites. Also, many Creative Common photos are restricted from commercial use and/or the artists require attribution. Tread carefully and make sure you understand the conditions for using images with Creative Common licenses.

For myself, I source my images either from reputable stack photo sites like Dreamstime.com or I use pictures I've taken myself, or I use images generated by Daz 3D. Because of the way DAS 3D licensing works, you can use any 2D images you generate from their 3D assets. If you generate a 2D image from those assets, you have the right to use it. As for AI generated images, read Amazon’s and the other site’s instructions on the use of the AI carefully before making something with the assistance of AI or wholly by AI.

It's possible Amazon and the other bookstores in the future may somehow penalize work created with AI, so it's not worth risking future problems by not disclosing AI use properly. Also, many people feel very strongly negative feelings about AI Art and associate it with books created using ChatGPT. As of right now on Amazon, if you publish a book, there is a check box you have to check saying that no elements of the book or its cover were created using AI. If you don't check that then your book has a little notice once published saying created with the assistance of AI, which can of course turn people off. And I suspect that Amazon added that so that if some point the legal environment turns against AI, they have a quick and easy way to say they're in compliance and getting rid of most of the AI generated content on their site. So for now, I would strongly recommend that you avoid using AI generated images on your cover.

#4: The fourth thing you shouldn’t put on your book cover is ineffective review quotes. One or two word reviews on covers like “magical” or “thrilling book” saying nothing about the book and make it look like there wasn't much that was positive to say in the reviews. Conversely, long reviews take up too much space on the cover and end up being hard to read. Someone who isn't well known or a celebrity public figure outside of your genre will look odd or someone who uses a random five star review from Goodreads, like for example Beth from Milwaukee says “I couldn't put it down.” Since the reader likely doesn't know Beth from Milwaukee, it's hard to be excited about her opinion or use Beth from Milwaukee's taste to compare with their own. Many people (often correctly) assume that the reviewer is paid or incentivized to write the review, and that it isn’t sincere.

For a public figure/celebrity/author, their review on your cover could be a liability later on if they end up associated with some type of scandal or crime. There is a major scandal going down right now with a major fantasy writer who, it turns out may have been involved in many inappropriate relationships (some of them may have been criminal, though none of this had been confirmed yet), and I bet a lot of people who have this major fantasy author’s blurb quotes on their book cover are kind of wishing they could take it off right now. Another potential pitfall is copyright, because technically anyone who writes reviews owns the copyright to that review. So if you quote, for example, from a random Amazon review, you technically don't have permission to do that unless you actually go out and get permission. So that is something to be aware of with quoting reviews on your cover. It’s generally not worth the hassle in my opinion.

#5: So the fifth thing you should not put on your book cover is scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people. Amazon does penalize authors for this, but the enforcement has always been rather inconsistent. The idea is that on Amazon there is what is something that's called “The Erotica Dungeon” where works that feature erotica or erotica style elements on their cover end up and they're not found by general search and you can only get to them through direct links. There's always problems with this, where people who actually do write erotica try to game the system so their books are visible outside of “The Erotica Dungeon” and people who don't write erotica but are mistakenly classified as it end up in “The Erotica Dungeon.” One of the surefire ways to end up in “The Erotica Dungeon” is to have scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people on your book cover. Amazon says book covers are not supposed to contain pornography, which is an intentionally vague warning from Amazon, which means they can interpret it however they want and they need to.

Some people find any amount of scantily clad people on a book cover to be gross, awkward, offensive, or embarrassing, even without having to carry the physical book cover around in public or at home. Some people think it makes the book looks like it's from the 1980s or the Fabio era of romance novels, and some people think it means the book is low quality or just erotica. Overall, I found that this tends to get enforced on Amazon when people complain about it, so overall it's best to avoid having scantily clad people in your book cover because it can become a problem for you later on. And in my opinion, in general, it's just in poor taste.

#6: The sixth thing you shouldn't have on your book cover is explicit violence/gore. Some people find this a little tricky to define because if you have, for example, on your book cover you have a man holding a sword and he's like making a dramatic pose, is that violence? Not really, no. But if you have the man, you know, driving the sword into someone’s, you know, mouth and blood is exploding on the back of the guy’s head, then that is definitely violence and will lead to your book being flagged. It's very hard to incorporate violence and gore well on your cover and could lead to your book getting flagged.

You'll notice that most with thriller or horror stories, which are often very violent. You know, the typical thriller story has, you know, the hero mowing down a bunch of bad guys and horror stories, often are quite violent, especially ones with, you know, serial killers or slashers. But they often don't have scenes from the books on the covers. It's a common convention for thriller novel to have a man with his back to the camera walking towards like the US Capitol, or something under a moody dramatic sky and a horror novel will have, like, you know, an abandoned looking house or a spooky looking forest on the cover or something of that nature. You notice that's not explicit violence. And it's a case where definitely less is more, and being understated is a better idea than being explicit. Anything that shows violence or abuse against children is very likely to be flagged, so avoid that.

And then finally, guns on book covers used to be forbidden, but this seems less of a problem now, provided the gun isn't pointed at a person. I've had a couple of book covers where a person is holding a gun, some Nadia ones. Avenging Fire and the Silent Order covers used to have people holding like future guns on them, but so long as the gun isn't pointed at a person or at the reader, then generally you're probably going to be okay. So just keep in mind that sometimes with violence on book covers, less is definitely more.

#7: The seventh and final thing that you should not have on your book cover is hate speech. Now hate speech is one of those things that is notoriously difficult to define, especially in the United States with the 1st Amendment and people constantly argue about what it is or what it isn’t or whether something is hate speech or isn't. And of course there's a spectrum to it where someone says something that's very obviously hate speech and can't be construed in any other way to a whole range of other statements that could be interpreted in different ways. But when it comes to book covers, Amazon specifically defines hate speech as “what we determine to be hate speech” and does not give specifics.

So that said, it's pretty easy to practically define it as anything that Amazon thinks makes it look bad or could harm their sales across the platform. So if you bear that in mind, it's probably pretty easy to avoid hate speech on your book cover, especially if you're writing about sensitive political topics. And again, that could be an example where once again you don't want to go too explicit, and it's probably fairly easy to avoid putting something that could be construed as hate speech on your book cover. So those are seven things you definitely do not want to put on your book cover.

So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.