In TPT search results your cover is a tile smaller than a postage stamp, competing with forty others for a tired teacher's attention. The stores that win that moment aren't necessarily better designers — they design for the tile, not for the full-size page. The principles are learnable in an evening.
Zoom your cover out until it's thumbnail-sized. Can you read the resource type and grade band? That's the whole test. Top sellers put one short, big-type promise on the cover ("Fractions Escape Room · Grades 3–4") and move everything else — feature lists, page counts, standards — to the thumbnails and description. If the tile needs squinting, the click goes elsewhere, and no amount of full-size beauty rescues it.
Successful stores look like stores: same fonts, same colour block placement, same layout skeleton on every cover. Buyers start recognising the brand in search results, and recognition is a click multiplier that single gorgeous one-off covers never earn. Practically: make one cover template, reuse it ruthlessly, and resist redesigning it every term.
Your three extra thumbnails are for evidence, not more marketing: real inside pages, at real quality, showing what the teacher actually downloads. The quiet fear behind every TPT purchase is "will this be clipart junk?" — inside pages answer it. Sellers who show pages convert browsers that pretty abstractions lose.
None of this survives blurry execution: export big, downscale to sharp squares (750×750 minimum, 1500×1500 better), keep text off the edges, and never let the platform's auto-crop make your composition decisions for you. The craft is cheap; the floor is non-negotiable.
General guidance from published seller-community practice, August 2026. Not affiliated with TPT (Teachers Pay Teachers).