Cover Elements & Facebook Ads
One side benefit of learning Photoshop/DAZ Studio and making my own covers is that I can reuse the cover elements to make image for Facebook ads. Facebook ads are pretty powerful, but at least 80% of an ad’s effectiveness comes from its image. A common way to get images for Facebook ads is to use stock photos. This can be tricky, since it’s hard to find a good stock photo that conveys a sense of what your book is about, and good stock photos get reused a lot. (More on that below.) But it’s very easy to use Photoshop to alter a book cover to create a Facebook ad image. Especially when you made the cover yourself and know how all the layers are put together!
Like, for example, here is the new cover for CHILD OF THE GHOSTS:
And using the elements from this cover, here was the Facebook ad image I created from it:
All the metrics for the ad using this image (cost per click, sales, etc) were excellent.
Previous to that, the best results I got for a Facebook ad using a stock image was from this picture:
I got the stock photo from Dreamstime.com here. It’s obviously a very striking photo, and stock images from that particular series turn up a lot. If you look at book covers on Amazon on a regular basis, you’ll see it turn up in many different book covers. And, in fact, it was used for the UK ebook edition of Ilona Andrews’ book MAGIC BLEEDS:
You can see that the cover was clearly composited together using stock images in Photoshop. Whoever designed the cover got the image off one of the stock photo sites and incorporated it into the cover. Nothing wrong with that – I do it myself, and it’s a frequent method of cover design in both indie books and tradpub books. So long as you pay the licensing fee to the stock photo site, it’s all perfectly legal and above-board. You can buy the exclusive right to use a stock photo, but if someone does that, the photo will not be up for browsing and licensing on the various (legit) stock photo sites.
That said, someone in the UK saw my Facebook ad using that stock photo and was tiiiiiicked. I got a long, angry “I-want-to-speak-to-your-manager” style message accusing me of ripping off the MAGIC BLEEDS cover, and the person complained to Facebook and tried to get the ad banned. Fortunately, the complaint was baseless enough that even Facebook’s automated algorithms (which, alas, are sometimes like the guard dog barking at a squirrel while burglars empty out the house) were not fooled.
So that was an bit of comedy in an otherwise stressful week. This does happen sometimes in the indie publishing world when an author unfamiliar with the legalities around stock photos sees a stock image from their cover used in another and then flips out, often on Twitter. In this life we must often learn things the hard way, but it’s best to avoid learning those lessons on social media.
Of course, you do have to rotate Facebook ads every so often because the ads grow “stale”, so to speak. The next time I need to refresh my ads, I think I will use this cover to generate a new image for a Facebook ad:
-JM