Covers, blurbs and pricing basics

By R. S. Breed · Updated Sep 28, 2026

Your cover, your blurb and your price are the three things a reader sees before deciding whether to read a single word of your book. Get them right and everything else (promotions, ads, word of mouth) works harder. Get them wrong and good writing goes unread.

None of this is about being original. It's about telling the right reader, at a glance, "this is the kind of book you like".

Covers

A cover's job is genre signalling

Readers browse by pattern. A cosy mystery reader scrolling a page of thumbnails is looking for the shapes, colours and fonts that mean "cosy mystery". If your cover looks like a literary novel or a thriller, that reader scrolls past, however good the book is.

Before you brief a designer or open any design software:

Open the bestseller list for your exact subcategory, not just "Fantasy" or "Romance".
Look at the top 20 to 50 covers together.
Write down what most of them share: type of image (people, objects, scenery, illustration), colour palette, font style, where the title sits, how big the author name is.

Your cover should look like it belongs on that page, while being clearly its own book. Fit in first, then stand out a little.

What genre covers use

The details shift over time and by subgenre, so always check the current list. Some broad patterns to look for:

Typography carries a lot of the signal. Script fonts, heavy serif capitals and hand-lettered titles each mean something different to readers.
People or no people. Some genres put characters on the cover; others use objects, symbols or settings. Look at what your subgenre does now.
Colour sets mood: dark and saturated for suspense, lighter and brighter for comedy and cosy fiction.
Series branding. Books in a series should look like a set: same font, same layout, a consistent element that changes (colour, object) from book to book.

The thumbnail test

Readers often first see your cover at the size of a postage stamp, in search results or on a phone.

Shrink your cover to roughly the size it appears in store search results.
Put it in a screenshot beside the top sellers in your subcategory.
Ask: can you read the title? Can you tell the genre? Does anything turn to mush?

If the title disappears, it's too thin or too long for the space. If the image turns into a blur, simplify it. Test in greyscale too: a cover that only works because of colour contrast may not hold up on every screen.

Designer, premade or DIY

Option	Upside	Downside
Custom designer	Built for your book and your series	Most expensive; good genre designers book up
Premade cover	Cheaper; you see the finished look before you buy	Less control; harder to extend to a series
DIY	Cheapest	Hardest to get right; genre signalling is a skill

If you use a designer, pick one whose portfolio is full of covers in your genre. Check what file formats and rights you get (ebook, print wrap, audio square, ads) before you pay.

AI images and disclosure

KDP requires you to tell it about AI-generated content (texts, images or translations) when you publish or republish a book, and its guidelines say AI-generated images include cover and interior images. If you created the work yourself and only used AI tools to edit or refine it, KDP calls that AI-assisted instead. When you publish, KDP asks a yes/no question about AI use, and if you answer yes you report texts, images and translations separately. Also check the licence terms on any stock image or font you use, including whether they allow commercial use on book covers.

Blurbs

The blurb (the book description) has one job: make the right reader want to start reading. It's not a synopsis. It doesn't reveal the ending.

A structure that works for most fiction

Hook line. One or two sentences, often in bold on the store page. A situation, a question or a promise that makes the genre clear.
The protagonist and their world. Who they are and what they want, in a few lines.
The disruption. What goes wrong or changes: the inciting incident.
The stakes. What they stand to lose, and why it can't be easily fixed.
The close. End on tension or a question, not a resolution.
Optional: a line on what readers will get ("a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance") or comparisons to well-known books or authors in your genre.

A made-up example of the shape:

She came home to sell the house. Someone wants her to stay forever.

Nora Vale left her island town at eighteen and never looked back. Now her mother is dead, the family inn is hers, and all she wants is a quick sale.

But the night she arrives, a guest disappears from Room 6, and the only witness swears Nora was there.

To clear her name, she'll have to dig into the town's oldest secrets. And the deeper she goes, the clearer it becomes that her mother's death was no accident.

Blurb tips

Keep it short. A few short paragraphs is enough for most fiction. Readers skim.
Use genre language on purpose. Romance readers look for tropes; thriller readers for stakes and pace. Name what they're looking for.
One or two characters only. A blurb with five names loses people.
Read it aloud. If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long.
Test it. Reading the blurbs of your subcategory's top sellers is the fastest way to learn what works there.

Worked rewrites, the common traps and KDP's rules for the description box: How to write a blurb that sells the first chapter.

Pricing

Price tells readers what kind of book to expect, and it decides which royalty band you land in.

Ebook royalties on KDP

KDP pays either 35% or 70% of the list price (before any VAT). Since 7 July 2026, the 70% rate is available on Amazon.com for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $12.99 (US). Before that, the ceiling was $9.99, where it had sat since the 70% rate was introduced in 2010. According to the Alliance of Independent Authors, books already priced between $10 and $12.99 on the 35% rate were not switched to 70% automatically, so if you have one, change its royalty option yourself.

Two things to know about the 70% rate:

Delivery fees apply. Amazon deducts a delivery cost based on file size. KDP says the average is about $0.06 per unit sold, but image-heavy files cost more.
Outside the band, you get 35%. A 99-cent ebook earns about 35 cents a sale.

Rough maths at 70%, before delivery fees: $2.99 earns about $2.09, $4.99 about $3.49.

Print royalties on KDP

Since 10 June 2025, KDP paperbacks priced under $9.99 on Amazon.com earn a 50% royalty (it was 60%). At $9.99 and above, it's 60%. The printing cost is then subtracted:

(royalty rate × list price) − printing cost = your royalty

KDP's own example: a 333-page black-ink paperback at $15 earns (0.60 × $15) − $5.00 = $4.00. Printing cost depends mainly on page count, ink and marketplace. KDP's help pages disagree about trim size (one says it doesn't matter, the printing cost page charges more for large trims), so run your own book through KDP's calculator.

For many novels the printing cost is high enough that pricing just under $9.99 earns little. On Amazon.com, KDP's black-ink printing cost for a book of 110 to 828 pages is $1.00 plus $0.012 a page. For a 300-page novel that's $1.00 + (300 × $0.012) = $4.60. At $9.98 you get (0.50 × $9.98) − $4.60 = $0.39 a copy. At $9.99 you get (0.60 × $9.99) − $4.60 = $1.39. Check the numbers before you settle on a price.

Selling wide

Other stores pay differently. Apple Books says it pays 70% on every ebook, whatever the price, and Barnes & Noble Press says it pays a flat 70% of list price. Kobo's rate depends on your price: the Authors Guild, quoted by Publishers Lunch, says Kobo pays 70% on ebooks priced at $2.99 or above, but check Kobo Writing Life's own help pages for its current bands. Aggregators take their own cut. Check each store's current royalty page if you're publishing outside Amazon.

Pricing a series

A series gives you more room to use price as a tool:

First book cheaper. Many authors price book one lower (sometimes 99 cents or free for a promotion) and the rest at full price. Readers risk less on an unknown author, and the later books earn the money.
Permafree. Some authors keep book one free permanently as a way in. It works best with a long series behind it and costs you the income from book one.
Keep later books consistent. Readers notice if book four costs twice as much as book three.
Box sets. Once you have three or more books, a bundle at a discount on the individual prices gives readers a reason to buy them all at once.

How to choose a starting price

Look at what the top sellers in your subcategory charge, for books by authors at a similar stage to you.
Price within that range.
Note the price and your sales, then change one thing at a time and give it a few weeks.

Don't price low because you're nervous about the book. Readers read very low prices as a signal too.

Sources

Platforms change their rules often. If something here is out of date, tell us in the forum and we'll fix it.