This One Simple Trick Doubled My Ebook Sales!

That headline is a bit of hyperbole. I actually increased the sales of one series by 78%. And while the trick was simple, it was a lot of work.

Basically, at the end of April I changed out the cover design and font for my SILENT ORDER science fiction series. I did it at the end of April because I could then compare the sales data from April to that from May. You can see one of the changed covers here:

And it worked! I didn’t do any additional promotions or advertising. All I changed was the covers, and the SILENT ORDER series sold 78% more copies in May than it did in June.

I think we can learn two lessons from that:

1.) It’s important to get the right style of covers for your genre. The book cover doesn’t have to be totally “accurate”, in that it depicts a detailed scene from the book. Rather, the cover has to say “this is the kind of book you can expect”, and it has to say it accurately. So, having a picture of a swooning heroine and shirtless hero in a mansion on a book about, say, fighting cyborgs from the future, that would not work.

This is the third iteration of the SILENT ORDER covers, and clearly it hit the mark closer than the previous two.

2.) Iterations are handy. If you don’t get something right the first time, you can improve it on the second go. You can see that with big-name tradpub books. Think how many different covers the HARRY POTTER series has had, some of them more effective than the others.

-JM