Okay; let's start from the very beginning of your book, the cover!
1. Your book cover should be what your book is about.
Imagine that you've come across a book. It has a picture of a couple making out while skinny-dipping. You or anyone's first thought might be that the book is a romance book.
But what if the book is a fantasy book, written about a big pink whale that is hated by all the other whales because of his abnormal looking colour? And that in the book there's actually no humans!
In other words, the couple making out has nothing to do with the plot! Surprise!
Maybe it's a good way to catch a reader's attention since romance books are quite popular in Wattpad but for how long? Three minutes?
When a reader is going to click on it and realize that the book has nothing to do romance, they wouldn't want to read it anymore. Because that's not what they signed up for!
Do you watch clickbaited YouTube videos? No, you don't! YouTube videos are usually 10 minutes long and people aren't even willing to watch a clickbait video for 2 minutes!
Then how are you so sure that someone will go through your book that's probably going to take them a few days to finish?
In other words, never make your covers irrelevant.
2. Make your covers eye-soothing.
"Don't judge a book by it's cover" is not valid!!!
A cover usually gives you an idea of the book. So, of course people are going to judge the book with the cover!
You can either make it based on your book or if you want to go with a simple cover (like I did with this book!) make it eye-catching.
By eye-catching, I don't mean this:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Yes, the cover is very eye-catching with all the neon colours and the random letters that popped up between but it's not eye-catching in a good way!
I know, every new Wattpad writers have done this and even I'm guilty of this! My books did get quite a lot of reads when I made covers like this but I had noticed that after one of my friends made a pretty cover for me, people clicked on my book more and my readers went from 1.3k to 6k pretty soon and not even a year later I had 100k+ reads! :)
If you're not good at making covers, you can always get help from cover shops that will make covers for you.
Or, you can just open up your computer or mobile, whatever you have and watch a YouTube video to learn how to make them yourselves. You really don't need to be good at editing to make a decent cover. For example:
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
This is still a very simple cover but you can notice that I haven't added anything extra while making this. Just typed the title and few other infos, used a few fonts and re-sized them and voila! (Also make sure to use 512x800 pixels while making a cover because it's the perfect picture size for Wattpad books!)
3. Write your username on your cover.
This is a very good way to make people remember your account! Imagine that someone has been commenting and voting on your book for quite some time. A while later, they stop. Of course, they might be taking a break but there could be possiblities that they have forgotten to add your book to their reading list!
"But, they can easily search up the name of the book.."
There are MANY books with the same name, most viewed ones are probably going to come up first so there could be a chance that the reader might never find your book again BUT by remembering your username, they can search you up and YOU ONLY to read your book again!
Another reason why you should definitely add the username is to prevent people from stealing your book covers.
Sadly, a lot of people steal book covers that are pretty. :( Mostly, books that have little readers. Because, stealing popular covers will instantly make people not support them but by using a book that isn't recognized by many people yet, everyone assumes that the "maker" made it by themselves.
