TIPS

First identify who you are selling to. Most new marketers don’t take the time to get to know their prospect. This includes the other places they go, what they do in their spare time, and most importantly, the language and words they use to describe things.

• There’s much more you can find out about your market, and when you do this, you can make creating any sales material easy on yourself- including an ecover of the product you’re selling. Marketers that have years of experience do this very thing.

Choose a bold, san-serif font for your ecovers headline or title, and smaller (but legible) text for the sub headlines and other text below it. What are the best fonts to use for your ecovers headline? Verdana, Arial Bold, Copperplate, Tahoma bold, and Myriad Pro.

Include at least one benefit in your ecovers headline or title.

• I was helping someone choose the best ecover out of two that they were working on. It was for an ebook. The first had a bright blue background with a title that said something to the effect of “Website Biz”. This is the one that needed the most work. That title is great if your brand is already established and is recognized by many people.
• But this was the title of a book that was brand new. It said nothing about what the book was about, therefore included no reason why the prospect would want to read it. People will buy a thing from emotion, and if you include the benefits your target market care about, you can grab their attention and increase the value of your ecover.

The smaller the font is, the more you need to spread out the letters.

• In other words, increase the font tracking in the image editor of your choice. This is a way of increasing the readability of the ecover. To test this, all you have to do after adding headlines and subheadlines to your ecover, is to use the magnifying glass tool in your image editor.
• Decrease the magnification and check to see if the text in your ecover needs to be a little larger, or if the tracking needs to be increased. Not sure why I see so many ebooks with text so small, the website they are on should offer free bottles of windex to clean off the nose prints from their visitors’ computer monitors.

Decrease The Tracking On Larger Text for your ecover. This should be simple, now that you’ve done the opposite to the smaller text. You can also bring the vertical space or “leading” closer together for better readability. This is also easily accomplished with the tools in your image editor.

Avoid Placing Text Over Busy Background Images

If you are ever in doubt of using a great looking background image over the words that will be used on your ecover, don’t do it. More than likely, if you do, it’s going to distract your prospect away from the words. And I hope those words communicate benefits to your prospect. In other words, busy backgrounds will kill the message. And any images that don’t relate to your target market, or the theme of what your product is about is asking for trouble.