I've advertised on Reedsy and gotten an excellent illustrator. It costs. You can query "Albert Cory" on Amazon and judge for yourself.

All the designs I got on 99Designs were crap.

Inventing the Future is you?

Yeah these are right on the cusp. Maybe I'm too discerning here. The font seems to blend into the background a bit more than one would expect and, "a novel" is way more faded than you would ever see in trad publishing.

But tbh most people might not even notice that. I don't really know. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what stand out sometimes.

that's me.

Trad publishers use offset printing, I believe. I'm not enough of an expert to know what effect that has. In self-publishing, you just provide a PDF.

They look good to me.

This is actually a huge factor - both the covers and the blurbs are hugely important. Self-published covers in competitive genres now have to be on-par with trad covers for a reader to bother clicking on them.

Niches where there may not be much trad coverage can be more forgiving. If you're writing in a small niche that not many other authors cover, you have more wiggle room with the cover art. But very popular genres with a high ceiling really benefit from a professional cover designer (or a professionally-designed premade).

Luckily, there are budget designers out there who are decent. I started out publishing short stories and doing my own covers and editing. My first works _sucked_ and I'm glad I used them more for practice and did not put money into them. Gradually as I started making more, I began investing those royalties in peripheral services: editing and covers. I now pay for covers, developmental edits, copy edits, and proofreads for each new book. I've improved a lot and am steadily building a readership, but my books still barely pay for themselves with the outlay required.

Not sure what your standards are, but a notably bad cover also shows the author has invested essentially $0 in their book. You can get passable quality work from sites like GetCovers for ~$10-$30 (I think I paid $25). Though it’s possible these are the kinds of covers you’re reacting negatively to.

“Real” covers from US-based artists start at more like $300, which is a more substantial outlay for a project that’s unlikely to pay it back.

Yeah I guess the issue is that there is a huge gap between notable bad, good, and what seems to come from trad publishing.

I dont think most of the covers are that BAD. They just stick out and its clear this book is self published.

I don’t think your impressions are entirely off-base here. If the author is so bad at judging the quality of the cover art (or, for me, the typesetting) I think it’s possible that it suggests a similar lack of judgement of quality for the writing (or, perhaps, editing) itself.

I would disagree - those skills (cover art, typesetting) are orthogonal skills to writing. These are some of the things (I assume) publishers would do for you.

Also, there are many things that I can judge to be good or bad, but that doesn't mean I can produce high quality examples myself. And getting high quality work from others isn't cheap, so it might be out of reach for self-published authors. Even if they know that the cover art isn't good, they might still use it, if they can't do better themselves and can't afford to hire someone who would do better.

That’s a very good point.

It's not about skills. It's about taste. Nothing wrong with getting someone else to do a cover or two. The question is whether the author had even the judgement to ask someone else for better work (in their taste). Same for typesetting. Same for proofreading.

And then there's the french publishers who prefer a text-only cover (and minimal at that) as a matter of their taste (and I guess, expectations of their customers - since not all french publishers go text-only).

Anything is possible, but I don't think judgement of visual aesthetics maps at all to quality of writing.

I'm a damn good technical writer and can break down complex ideas into clear and understandable prose, but I don't know the first thing about fonts or typesetting.

Sure. But only to a point. If it looks laughably bad, then sure it probably doesnt bode well for the quality of the writing. But if the cover is fine/good enough but clearly not something that would come from a trad publishing house... That is when the cover might not be reflective of the work but still hold people, myself often included, back.

100% this. I would so love someone artistic to have created my book cover, but the book was a passion project for me to make a Sci-fi book my daughter would have liked, and is being sold for $0 so paying anyone was outside my budget. I have since talked to an artist and we may do an illustrated version together.

Use Midjourney for a cover and ChatGPT for a synopsis