Anatomy of a Best Selling KDP Book Cover

I often see best-selling low content books on amazon, while doing my kdp niche research or kdp keyword research. 

Whenever I see such a book on amazon pulling a lot of sales every month, I think about the possible things that kdp publisher is doing right to make his / her book succeed. And one of those success factors is the Book Cover!!

I know it’s a very obvious thing to know about a successful book, but we often don’t pay close attention to the key elements that make a best-selling book cover. 

Keeping this in mind, I am going to discuss some key elements of a best-selling book cover. 

I am going to kinda dissect a best-selling book cover, and share with you the things that are making that book cover a success. So, do read this post till the very end…

Let’s just dive in…

What Makes a Best Selling KDP Book Cover?

As I said earlier, I am going to pick on the best-selling book cove and discuss the main factors behind its success. 

For the sake of this blog post, I am going to choose and discuss a very popular coloring book cover. Chances are you may have already seen this book at least once on amazon. 

The book title is “The Creative Toddler’s First Coloring Book Ages 1-3”. It’s a very simple coloring book of everyday things and animals and it’s targeting toddlers of 1 to 3 year olds. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, this book has over 3,500 reviews almost all five stars. This very book is priced at $5.99 and currently ranking at #676 in the amazon book store. 

Side note: This coloring book may be published via Amazon FBA, but it doesn’t matter, all you need is to understand the main elements of its success.

This number is known as the best seller rank and it tells about the popularity of any given book. With this BSR of 676, this book is selling 192 copies per day and 2,887 copies per month which is insane. 

Have a look at TCK Publishing Amazon Book Sale Calcular;

As you saw, this book is killing in terms of sales and this is mainly due to its Cover. That’s why I am going to discuss the key element of this one of the mega-successful kdp book covers. 

Before moving forward, have a closer look at the front cover.

Now, let’s just discuss what this book cover has in it…

# 1 – It Speaks to the Audience

What I mean by that is, this cover clearly portrays the interior of the book. By merely looking at this cover, the potential buyer can have a lot of information about the book’s content. 

The potential buyer for this book may include a mom, a dad, or a teacher who may be looking for a very basic yet interesting book for a toddler. And, this book cover answers all their questions. In other words, it clearly says what should they expect from this book and why. 

As you may already know, people don’t buy things, they buy expectations. Therefore, the first job of a book cover is to set the right expectations for a buyer. And this coloring book cover does this very well!

# 2 – The Selection of Colors

The 2nd key element of this book cover is the selection of colors. They are using only two primary colors for the background i.e Blue and White, however, you can notice the blue is not overly saturated. They also used these colors for a part of their book title.

You can also notice that they are using a different colors for each letter of the word “COLORING” which enhances the look and feel of this cover. 

The colors are few and in the right proportion: white color is almost 60%, Blue is 30% and 10% is the black color. The color selection and usage is ideal for a toddler’s book, that’s why it catches the eyes of the ideal customer as well. 

I have written a detailed post about How to Create Coloring Books for Amazon Kdp the Right Way! You may find it useful too!

# 3 – The Selection of Fonts

The selection and usage of the fonts make this coloring book cover stand out in the sea of coloring books. They are basically using two fonts, but in different colors and weights (the third may be a hand-drawing or pencil drawing).

Just like the colors, the fonts are also according to the age range (1-3 years old toddlers). The selection of the right fonts with the right colors is attracting the right audience. 

You may have noticed, that they are using a very beautiful looking font for the main word e.g COLORING. This font is very similar to a Cut Marker, which gives it a toddler look and feel.

As we saw, their font selection is awesome. You may already know that font selection is very crucial when it comes to creating best-selling book covers.

# 4 – The Selection of Graphics

The selection of relevant graphics makes this book cover a Winner! You can see the way they have filled (colored) the graphics using a brush or pencil tool. 

These colored images of a strawberry and a snail appear to be colored by a toddler. The colors are not properly filled which makes it stand out from other similar books. The selection of colors for filling these graphics is also amazing. 

They have also included two pencil colors using the same fill colors as the other two images. The usage of relevant imagery in a unique way can really boost the look and feel of a book cover. 

# 5 – A Pro Look & Feel

When you closely look at this cover, you can clearly observe that this appears to be designed by a professional designer. It has no errors with respect to the rules of graphic design. 

This cover is free from graphic design errors as most amateurish covers do have. There are a lot of things that may make a cover look pro, a few are listed below;

• Use of matching fonts
• Use of the right colors
• Alignment of the elements on the cover
• Usage of white space / negative space
• Usage of hierarchy

I know some of these are very technical terms but you can easily understand them if you have a basic knowledge of graphic design. 

My Verdict

As you read through this post, I have shared some of the key elements of a best-selling book cover. The cover I shared with you is very professionally designed keeping in view certain things that contribute to its success. 

To recap, what makes this cover stand out is;

• It is designed keeping in view the targetted audience.
• The selection and usage of colors is great.
• The selection of the fonts is also great.
• It has imagery that gives an overview of the book’s content.
• The has a professional look and feel.

Reading other successful covers like this can really improve the way you design your book cover. Before creating your next cover, you can do a quick search on amazon and see other successful covers and note down their main elements of features. 

You can even try recreating some of the successful covers just for the sack of practice only. However, publishing books by copying other people’s covers can lead to kdp ban. So don’t try to copy covers, just take inspiration and create your own unique cover.

Thanks for reading this post till the very end. I sincerely hope, this post will help you in creating better covers for your kdp low-content books. If you like this post, then I would love it if can share this on any social media platform. 

Just click on one of the social buttons below…thanks for sharing it:)

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Subha Malik