You Don’t Need to Be a Graphic Designer to Sell eBooks

One thing that holds a lot of people back is the curse of perfectionism, especially when it comes to creating and selling ebooks.

They think you need all kinds of elaborate graphics, the world’s greatest cover, and everything else needs to be spotless.

Well, I’m here to tell you none of that matters all that much.

I’ll give you two examples:

The first book is Gorilla Mindset and at least the first edition, the one I own, has multiple obvious typos printed right on the pages.

And yet… it sold over 100,000 copies.

To be fair, the marketing of the book was stellar, and despite the typos, the content still helps me to this day.

Another, much smaller scale example is my own ebook How To Write Emails That Sell.

There are no typos but it’s a very basic looking PDF with a simple eCover I whipped up in Canva in about 10 minutes, and it’s only 31 pages long.

It sold 50 copies from my own small audience (with no marketing boost on Amazon), and it even helped me land email copywriting clients when I was doing that back then.

And the coolest part is since it was completely self published and self hosted, my profit margins were 88%.

Try getting those margins on Amazon…

It’s not going to happen even on Kindle.

Tangents aside, my main point here is to ship faster than you think you should.

Get the ideas on (digital) paper.

Put it online.

Start selling it now.

People need the solution you’re offering.

There’s nothing worse than sitting on your idea endlessly and wishing you published it sooner when you finally get around to it, if at all.

On a similar note…

I’m wrapping up the finishing touches of my upcoming ebook, The Info Product Lifestyle Blueprint, where I break down the exact system I used to gain over 113 customers from a small audience in one niche.

More info is available for readers of my daily emails here:

https://infoproductlifestyle.com

And just like the lesson inside this post, it’s simple and focused on the actual message more than the design.

Because I have to face the facts… I can rite alright but I ain’t no graphic designer.

Any questions? Let me know.

Talk soon,

-Gabe

Originally published at https://gabejohansson.com on August 31, 2025.