Fantasy Novel Cover Art

Inspired by a Tweet from the ever-helpful Matthew J Holmes, I thought I might put my cover for Conqueror’s City alongside the covers for other fantasy (or fantasy-adjacent!) novels on Amazon, to see what I could learn. 

You can find Matthew’s original thread at the link below. The rest of it is well worth a read if you’re thinking about publishing/marketing a novel.

Matthew J Holmes on Twitter: “With 5 books published, I’ve taken my wife’s royalties from $100 per month to $15,000 per month. Yes, the Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads played a role, but it’s the book product itself where the magic happens. Here’s the 5 steps I’ve followed to increase book sales:” / Twitter

Criteria for selecting candidates were fairly loose:

• Fantasy genre or subgenre (e.g. historical fantasy)
• A mix of big name authors and unknowns (unknown to me that is!)
• Mix of trad publishing and self publishing
• A significant number of ratings on Amazon (to hopefully get a balanced view on the book)
• Otherwise, whichever covers caught my eye as I flicked through Amazon

So, what did I learn?

Two asides:

1. There are masses of really popular authors out there that I don’t know about – I need to read more!
2. There seems to be significantly more female authors than male. Could be a function of the Amazon algorithm skewing the picture but interesting imo 

Now onto the artwork:

1. Curly swirly fonts are very popular, as are blocky embossed text
2. Dark colours with pale writing is a popular scheme
3. Relative size of title vs author’s name largely tracks with how well known the author is
4. 15/20 covers have one large central image, as opposed to what I’d call a background image (like The Storm Sister or The Druid)
5. Conn Iggulden and Raymond E Feist have similar taste in covers!
6. Quotes/taglines on the front cover aren’t that popular (3/20) 
7. Series name and episode number are definitely popular (12/20)