This cover is available as a premade design
My book cover fell in love with the Google algorithm in the spring.
I’m not exactly sure when it started. At first, it just talked about Google suspiciously often. Then it began making an effort with its appearance.
It got a proper file name. Alt text. An image description. Keywords.
After a while, it was difficult to tell where search engine optimization ended and vanity began.
I told it not to get its hopes up. The Google algorithm looks at billions of pages every day.
So my cover added more keywords.
Premade thriller book cover. Psychological thriller cover. Suspense book cover design. Dark book cover. One-of-a-kind premade book cover.
It looked like a woman who had sprayed herself with every perfume in the store at once.
The algorithm did not respond.
My cover had me write a blog post about it.
It got a heading. A meta description. An internal link.
It did not get an external link.
We weren’t that desperate.
Google crawled it once.
My cover didn’t sleep all night.
It doesn’t sleep during the day either.
JPEG.
Then nothing happened for weeks.
My cover started appearing in thumbnail size around Google. It thought perhaps it had come on too strong and needed to be more subtle.
It is difficult to be subtle when you are a dark psychological thriller book cover featuring a black spiral staircase descending into nothingness with the words HELP ME waiting at the bottom.
The algorithm visited again.
This time it stayed for fourteen seconds.
My cover said it was a date.
I said it was a crawl.
I didn’t want to break its heart.
Then summer came.
It was a warm July night. Servers hummed softly in the darkness. Somewhere in California, an air-conditioning unit in a data center malfunctioned.
It was difficult to imagine more romantic circumstances.
The Google algorithm came back.
It crawled the cover.
It indexed the cover.
Then it displayed the cover in a search result.
The next morning, my book cover was glowing.
Its black was blacker.
Its grey was greyer.
The staircase still led toward almost certain death, but somehow it looked hopeful now.
They were together.
I was happy for them.
It didn’t last long.
At the end of August, the historical romance custom cover appeared.
At first, the Google algorithm merely crawled it.
My cover said that didn’t mean anything.
Then Google indexed it.
My cover called it a professional relationship.
Then Google ranked it higher.
By then, we all knew.
The custom cover even had worse alt text.
That hurt the most.
Eventually, the Google algorithm explained what had happened.
My cover’s genre characteristics had become emotionally exhausting.
The dark monochrome thriller book cover design, the cold black-and-grey color palette, the descending spiral staircase, the strong visual hierarchy, and the disturbing visual storytelling had seemed exciting at first.
But after three months, the algorithm felt the relationship wasn’t going anywhere.
Only down.
Round and round.
And then down again.
Worse still, every time Google tried to discuss the future of their relationship, two words were waiting at the bottom:
HELP ME.
Google felt this was emotional pressure.
With the historical romance custom cover, the algorithm felt safe.
My cover didn’t make a scene.
Thriller.
Patient genre.
It is still waiting.
Yesterday it asked me how to make someone disappear from the first ten search results.
I told it we should probably save that for another article.
Continue the Conversation
If this story resonated with you, here are three more you might enjoy.
– I’d Like to Explain This Cover. Unfortunately, I Designed It.
A professional analysis of a dark romance book cover involving two men, a skull, twelve kilos of rose petals, and several increasingly questionable design decisions.
– Two Men Tried to Choose a Dark Romance Book Cover. It Did Not Go Well
One man is blind. The other is deaf. Together, they attempt to choose a premade dark romance book cover. Tony Contrast and Sarah Serif somehow become involved.
– She Spent 23 Minutes Scrubbing a Thriller Book Cover. There Was Just One Problem
Klara finds a suspicious red-and-black stain in a writer’s apartment and spends 23 minutes trying to remove it. Unfortunately, it is a thriller book cover.
Looking for a book cover with slightly fewer emotional problems?
Vertigo and my other one-of-a-kind premade book covers are available on Ko-fi. Each cover is sold only once — although I cannot guarantee that none of them are currently involved with a search engine.
→Browse my premade book covers on Ko-fi
Mad Tea Afternoon
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