Cover Week 1: Why So Many Covers Suck

As readers, we love to snark covers. It's true, many covers outright suck, but covers are expensive.

How expensive?

Here's the budget for the cover we did on the absolute cheap:

Models: $150/hour, 2 models per cover = $300 per cover if you're lucky
Photographer: $400
Stylist: $200 (we lucked into one who does hair/makeup as well)
Costume rental: $70
Makeup assistant: Free because we got a student
Props: Borrowed
Graphic Design and Photo Post: 2 days @ $300=$600

Total: $1570

Here is the stuff we already own:
Camera: $3000
Laptop: $1400
Software: $2000
Studio Space: $500/month
Lighting equipment: $3000
Total investment before one shot is even taken: $9900

I could pro-rate that stuff with what's called amortization but I'm not an accountant so let's just say the up-front investment is the photographer's problem, and the publisher is only paying for the cover.

So - $1570 per cover. Harlequin pays many times that - their models and photographers cost a lot more, plus they pay art directors, plus they pay separately for makeup, hair, and stylist. So $1570 is really a dirt cheap number.

Now - I've just gone to New Concepts Publishing's website and counted the covers on just their front page. There are 24. At the $1570 rate, they are out $37,680 just for their front page covers alone.

If they're selling the average ebook for $5, they have to sell 314 ebooks just to break even on the cover alone. Before they've paid for anything else, before anyone has made a dime.

Obviously, no small publisher has these kinds of bucks. So here is what is done to save money:

1. Combine several shoots into one day. If you're going to have the space rented, the photographer there, and the makeup person hired, you may as well shoot your ass off and use the pictures wherever you can. Sucky cover result: People on the covers who look nothing like the characters/Re-used cover images.

2. Computer-generated people. Why pay models or photographers at all? Hence the Poser plague. Sucky cover result: To paraphrase Charlton Heston, "Poser is... not... people..." Witness:

Pic snatched from Smart Bitches.

3. No people on the cover at all. This is where you get landscapes, butterflies, roses, lace, or what have you on the cover. Sucky cover result: bland boringness, though most readers prefer this over the Poser embarrassments.

And, even if you're Harlequin with the big budget, you can still make a sucky cover, like the infamous "bored handjob" masterpiece:

Don't get too cocky.

Tomorrow: Before and afters.