Tips for Better Cover Reveals (Patreon)

There are a million little parts of being an author that most people don't know that they don't know. Or they may not feel crucial until they're coming down the road at you and you realize you don't even know what questions to ask in order to be prepared. Here are some quick tips and then additional thoughts on how to have a better experience with cover reveals.

1. Make sure the post has a high-res version of the cover so that people can properly marvel at the cover. This also makes it easier for various websites/groups to feature your work due to the easy access to this higher-res version of the cover. I have lost track of the times when I wanted to use a cover when promoting a colleague's book and I couldn't find any versions of the cover large enough for the format I was using to shout out their work. Bloggers, interviewers, librarians, and booksellers will thank you.
   
2. Credit the artist and/or designer prominently. This is both a matter of professionalism in recognizing the creative work of the people that help your book succeed and a way to cross-pollinate your audience and the artist/designer's followers and/or their network.
   
3. Place the reveal with a venue that reaches your ideal audience for the work. This requires some reflection and/or discussion about who your book's target audience is. Is the book both a science fiction adventure and a romance? If so, then your target audience is people in the intersection of those two genre tastes. This may mean trying to find a venue that reaches or (ideally) focuses on that intersection. If you've written a YA fantasy with non-western worldbuilding, you'd be well-advised to do your cover reveal with a venue that has prominently featured other YA fantasy with non-western worldbuilding, etc.
   
4. Some have had success combining a cover reveal with an excerpt, an interview with the artist/designer, and/or something else to help it stand out and to deepen reader investment. Once you have someone's attention with a pretty cover, figure out you most want to do with that attention.
   
5. Figure out next steps/calls-to-action. The thing you might want to do most with that attention is capture interest. If you have pre-order buy links available already, include them. If your book is set up on Goodreads/LibraryThing, make it easy for people to add it there. You might instead invite people to sign up for your newsletter to get updates on that book.
   
6. Include critical metadata like the ISBN, the release date, the formats available, etc. This is more for booksellers and librarians than general readers, but booksellers and librarians can have a huge impact on the book's reach, so a bit of extra work to make their jobs easier is probably worth your while.

In my opinion, cover reveals should be facilitated by your book's publisher whenever possible. Publishers tend to have more and better connections with the kinds of venues that will get the best results for you and your book and a good publisher should have at least an unofficial process for cover reveals based on what has worked best for them in the past.

But "whenever possible" is not "100% of the time". Sometimes your publisher doesn't have the connections/clout/heat to get the cover reveal that's best for you and your book, and it's left to you, the author. 

As I often say, it's good to discuss with your publisher what their plans are - what they hope and/or expect from a cover reveal. If you've followed the publisher's actions with other books and they've not done a good job with cover reveals, you may need to take a more active role in that part of the publishing conversation. If you have dream venues in mind going into the conversation about a cover reveal, that can help the publisher's staff get a sense of your expectations and what you see as the venues that can best reach the book's audience.

At the bare minimum, there should be some place on the internet where you can link people to your cover and a page where they can see your cover and critical metadata. But IMO the bar should be higher than that, especially in very competitive categories like YA and ones where librarians/institutional buyers have an even greater impact on a book's performance.