Early Lessons Learned on Book Cover Choices

Back to the topic of covers for a moment. When I was thinking about cover design I was fully aware that book covers needed to not only look good on a physical copy of a print book, they need to look good as a thumbnail online as well.  I will advise everyone against a sleek, minimalist, and especially white book cover. It just doesn't work well online, and online is going to be the most important mechanism for people to discover indie published books. Here's an illustration of my problemo:

Book cover as it appears on the physical book:

 The obvious critique is that the white of the cover fades into the background white (and white is the color of most backgrounds on the web, including at Amazon.com). But the font is also too small to be read as a thumbnail, so I have some issues to work out. Therefore, I've modified my cover image for the web to look like this:

Now cover is outlined and I added a shadow (which causes it's own challenges, but I think it gives it some needed depth), and I also enlarged the font size of both the title and my name. So, this is better, but next time around I intend to have a cover that looks more like the following covers (sorry, I cannot figure out how to get them horizontally arranged...):