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Book Covers


George Mitchell

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Would it not be a good idea to have a seperate upload facility to exclusively point to Book Covers? As this is a very specialised subject with the use of blur and grain could these fall foul of QC? With amongst many subjects for the covers, thriller and fantasy are amongst best sellers. If these were uploaded into conventional image libraries perhaps this could be misleading and potential book publishers miss what they are looking for.

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There is no reason that images produced with book covers in mind can't submitted through the normal route. We have a great selection of images geared towards that very subject:

 

http://www.alamy.com/category/book-covers.html

 

Cheers

 

Alamy

 

I wonder . . . does having a collection of potential book covers such as you show here (and I assume customers who state they're looking for a book cover are herded to this collection) mean that book-cover seeking customers would only see this collection, thereby cursing the great unwashed (the rest of us) to never have our images pass before their eyes?

 

Not that I'm for one iota suggesting that every potential book cover isn't in that collection . . . :P

 

dd

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There is no reason that images produced with book covers in mind can't submitted through the normal route. We have a great selection of images geared towards that very subject:

 

http://www.alamy.com/category/book-covers.html

 

Cheers

 

Alamy

 

I wonder . . . does having a collection of potential book covers such as you show here (and I assume customers who state they're looking for a book cover are herded to this collection) mean that book-cover seeking customers would only see this collection, thereby cursing the great unwashed (the rest of us) to never have our images pass before their eyes?

 

Not that I'm for one iota suggesting that every potential book cover isn't in that collection . . . :P

 

dd

 

 

No - its just a selection of images our director of photography has put together for client promo purposes. The majority of book cover buyers will be doing the usual image searches, we just used the link here to illustrate the point that there is already lots of suitable imagery online that hasn't had to come through a specific separate upload route.

 

Cheers

 

Alamy

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Should I add the "book cover" keyword to some of my images? Will it be useful to clients?

My guess is that if you do you'll come up in lots of searches for 'book'. AoA suggests that most searches including 'book cover' also have the name of a book, or category of books - as if they're looking for pictures of books, rather than pictures to go on book covers ;-)

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Should I add the "book cover" keyword to some of my images? Will it be useful to clients?

My guess is that if you do you'll come up in lots of searches for 'book'. AoA suggests that most searches including 'book cover' also have the name of a book, or category of books - as if they're looking for pictures of books, rather than pictures to go on book covers ;-)

 

 

I agree with David. Don't add it to your keywords. It will negatively affect your Alamy Rank.

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Should I add the "book cover" keyword to some of my images? Will it be useful to clients?

My guess is that if you do you'll come up in lots of searches for 'book'. AoA suggests that most searches including 'book cover' also have the name of a book, or category of books - as if they're looking for pictures of books, rather than pictures to go on book covers ;-)

 

 

I wouldn't be too hasty here . . . there are a few different ways of looking at the stats for the past year:

 

There were indeed many single-customer searches for particular book covers (book covers on table, book covers art, book covers spanish etc etc). However, there were 16 individual customers looking for "book covers", a search that for example gives over 90 images suitable for book covers on the first page of results . . .

 

There are quite a few other nuances reasonably evident in those stats, such that I for one am definitely not going to summarily dismiss the notion of somehow identifying potential book covers via keywords--it certainly warrants some careful consideration IMO.

 

All this must of course be viewed through the "no sales recorded for those particular searches (yet)" window of course . . .

 

dd

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The filter that the Alamy editor is using: verticals only is plain silly and very counter productive.

My images on Alamy that have been sold as cover:

 

17 horizontals

4 verticals

2 squares.

 

So I was lucky that the clients who bought those were not using that filter also.

Otoh I'm pretty sure my images have not been used for chick-lit, and the only one that has been used for a detective, indeed is a vertical.

 

Maybe I should start cropping/rotating my images to verticals and create a pseudo Book Covers. Or a new collection Book Covers.

If only the pseudo field was searchable (yes I know about advanced - nobody uses it because it nowhere to be found and there's no help page).

Three contributors have had the same idea already:

Marc Soler - Book covers (19)
Book cover picture elements (183)
and the highest ranking:
book cover art Joana Kruse (2,016)

(-highest ranking because her first competitor doesn't appear before page 8)

A simple search for Book Cover: 161,006 images.

Dusty is right: Indeed almost all searches for book cover on AoA are for actual books, albeit sometimes generic ones.

 

wim

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Dusty - you could well be right, but it could also be that at least some of the searches for 'book covers' alone were from people looking for pictures of books covers. What I do know is that in my early days on Alamy I did add possible categories of use to the keywords, and my monitoring of it suggested that it was counter productive - more often than not those keywords caused my images to come up in irrelevant searches. 

 

On the other hand, book covers tend to be (relatively) high value sales, so maybe it's worth doing ... 

 

 

... Dusty is right: Indeed almost all searches for book cover on AoA are for actual books, albeit sometimes generic ones.

 

wim

I thought that was my point ;-) 

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