Have you thought about doing a cover reveal for your upcoming book? Have you seen other authors reveal their covers and wonder what was up? Revealing your cover can be a great way to generate pre-launch excitement for you book. And they can super simple or a grand event depending on the time and resources you have to put into them. In this post, we’re going to cover different platforms for hosting your cover reveal, as well as a few different ways that you can generate excitement about your cover reveal. Before we get into that, let’s cover some cover reveal basics.
3 Cover Reveal Basics You Need to Know
1. Use a High Quality Graphic – Formatted for the Web
When doing my research for a cover reveal, I googled cover reveals and found a few where the cover image didn’t load. That’s a HUGE problem as you can imagine. We recommend using the file for your actual Kindle cover, but resizing it to smaller proportions and saving it for the web. You can easily do this with Adobe Photoshop, as well as most other graphics programs.
2. Let Reader’s Know the Status
If you’re revealing the cover before the book releases, make sure your prospective readers know that it’s not yet available and how to get updates. If you have a release date, include that with your post. You’ll also want to keep your readers updated on the status after your reveal so they don’t forget that it’s coming and they want to read it.
3. Include a Teaser
Covers are the first thing that draws the readers attention. But once you have their attention, you have to captivate them with more information. Unless you’ve kept your audience completely up-to-date with your book, and they already know what it’s about, you’ll want to include more information about that book. We recommend writing a short teaser about the book to play on their desire for more.
Now that we’ve covered those three important facts, lets look at the different options for where you can host your cover reveal.
Where to Host Your Cover Reveal
There is no one set platform for revealing your book cover. When planning your cover reveal, think about what you want it to accomplish. If you want to increase the number of views to your website, you may want to release it on your blog. We just released our newest cover via a Facebook post. Our goal was not only to generate excitement for our upcoming book, but also to increase the number of likes on our FB page. You can see our cover reveal post here: http://smarturl.it/cover-reveal
You can also reveal your cover through various social media groups, boards or forums. If you look up groups in your genre on Pinterest, Google+, FB groups, and other social media platforms, many will have places to specifically post cover reveals, and others will allow cover reveals within a certain genre. So that’s another option.
You may even decide to exclusively reveal your cover to your newsletter subscribers or personal friends and family. The sky really is the limit. Those are just a few ideas.
Generating Excitement About Your Cover Reveal
Once you decide how you’ll host your cover reveal, you can brainstorm ways to generate excitement about the event. For our cover reveal, we sent an e-mail to our list with a link back to the Facebook post, then shared it in various groups and on other social media platforms.
To generate even more excitement, Random House recommends creating a FB event vs. just using a post. This helps build excitement by allowing you to engage your fans on a deeper level. You can read Random House’s post at: http://randomnotes.randomhouse.com/the-art-of-the-cover-reveal/. I’ve seen authors do Facebook events for their cover reveals that have gone amazingly well. The one I remember the most was set up by their publisher, and the author did a Q&A about the book during the live event. They set it for a certain day and time, then released the cover at the beginning of the Q&A session.
Another one of my author friends revealed her cover through a CrossReads Book Blast. CrossReads set up a blog tour for her where her cover appeared on 25 blogs on the same day and she gave away a $50 Amazon gift card through a RaffleCopter giveaway. You could set something like that up on your own or hire it out. CrossReads offers book blasts like this for Christian authors, but I know there are other companies that offer similar promotion.
If you plan to do a full scale event, you’ll want to do more planning. We would recommend having a Q&A about the book or coming up with some way to encourage attendee involvement beyond looking at the cover. You might even consider doing a giveaway for a copy of the book upon release.
Conclusion
Book cover reveals can be as intensive as you want; you can plan a full scale event, post your cover on the run, or let it reveal on it’s own. However, we believe that cover reveals can be a great way generate pre-launch excitement for your book.
Have you done a cover reveal for one of your books? We’d love for you to share your experience with us in the comments below!
When do you recommend the cover be revealed? Part of me thinks that waiting until the day the book is released will draw the greatest reaction, garnering sells. But the other part of me thinks that doing it about a month before the release date will build even more excitement for the big day itself. What do you think?
Hi Phil – revealing it before the launch is what helps build excitement. For her newest book published through Writers’ Digest, K.M. Weiland didn’t do an official cover reveal that I saw, but she has been plastering her cover all over her blog and other places on the web for several weeks. So when her launch started yesterday, she already had a ton of people who were excitedly awaiting its release.
When you reveal it is ultimately up to you, and it should fit in with the rest of your book launch plan.
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