eBooks Your Cover Is EveryThing: Here Is The Data Proving It!

Great books, have great covers. Some of them are just amazing. As starting writing and self publishing you read a lot about book cover designers. I am starting to see that book cover art is important. Its your storefront.
But thing is that I am stubborn and like to get my hands dirty.
In order to get dirty hands I have been orientating myself and have found a few ways that I am going to share with you.

Way #1 Have Your eBook Cover Designed By A Pro
Depending on your budget your can have your cover designed via:
- www.fiverr.com and check out this guy.. nice
- www.bookcoverpro.com very expensive but offers software tools as well. Website out of the air..

One of my favorites is this guy http://goonwrite.com/ produces some nice materials and talks like a normal human being not like a preprogrammed Corporate America writer. Reasonable prices as well.
Pricing can be anything varying from $30 to $900 for a cover, depending on what you what ofcourse.
Take into account the cost of additional ISBN number and barcode, the cheapest book you can get is about $200 excluding marketing etc.

Way #2 DYI
Depending on what you are writing if you know your way around Photoshop you will be able to create bookcovers. If you dont know your way around Photoshop, dont bother learning unless you are naturally gifted, try MS Powerpoint. It might not always be perfect but for 60% of ebooks it will work.
The one I have attached as reference is a result of 10 minutes work.

Is it perfect? Far from, point being is that the secret of a good book cover lays in the balance between art and font type (including book title) and that is something for very creative people to balance.

A lot is being said and written about book cover design, data shows that nothing is more true than that

• The fact that 90% of the readers that buy a book do not finish the first chapter of a book, 
•  10% of readers makes it past the first chapter
•  60% of readers does not make it till the end of the book
•  4% of readers finishes a book that they opened, a shocking 96% doesn't! 

I am not making it up, read in a book from Tony Robbins

The conclusion: It is hard to get people to buy your book, it is even harder to get them to finish it.
Therefore the combination of book cover, marketing skills seem to be more important then your content.

Lets put that into real day life.  My little whitepaper #1 in some category has had 215 downloads, applying the above data it means 8 people finished it. Depressing? Yes! Especially because that cover was crap!!

Not sure if you agree, leave your comments!