I’m lucky that I primarily write ’non fiction’ and ’technical books’ so my covers do not have to be particularly eye catching.

• Which means that simple works for my genre.

My books are primarily sold online.

• Which means the covers have to work well as thumbnails.

I sell as an ebook prior to selling on paperback.

• Which means I can go live quickly without a cover - just a thumbnail with the book title
• Which also means I can change the cover a number of times early in the process and experiment.

Lessons in cover design:

• you need to be able to read the title
• you need to be able to read the author
• you don’t need to see much else

One of my most recent books was “Java For Testers”, shown below:

Compare the above image, to the “Selenium Simplified” cover below and you can see if I learned my lessons. This needs to be much larger to be readable, and e-book thumbnails are not normally that large.