Book covers are one of the most important components to getting a potential reader to check out your book. Especially in the online, thumbnail world of perusing ebooks, people really do judge the book by its cover.

One of the things that has made self-publishing a success has been the ability for authors to outsource the work normally managed by a traditional publisher, such as editing, book covers and marketing.

If you are not gifted in Photoshop, finding an effective book cover designer is must and many of them use their skills to pull from existing stock photos and rework them into something powerful. However, pulling from the same pool of stock photos can cause some overlap.

Months ago I read a self-published book called A Pius Man and today I heard a podcast about an author who self published a book called The Cleaner.

This is the first time I’ve seen such an obvious overlap of material in book covers, but with more and more people creating and self-publishing their own works, I wonder if this issue will only increase?