Why Book Cover Design Matters (And Some Tips to Do It Right)
“Don't judge a book by its cover” is a nice thought, especially as it's applicable to, say, other people. When it comes to actual books, though, readers absolutely do judge books by their cover, and while this might be a hot take, I don't think that's a problem. I would argue it's the whole reason the cover exists in the first place. Not just to entice readers (though that's part of it) but also to inform them about the kind of story they're getting into and help them decide if it's something they'd enjoy reading.
This has become especially important in the modern era of publishing. It's a great thing that self-publishing has taken down some barriers that used to stop writers from sharing their work. That said, it also means readers can't count on a book being well-written or telling a complete, interesting story just because it's been put out into the world. These days, readers can't be sure whether a human even wrote the damn thing. If your book's cover is pixelated and grainy, or looks obviously AI generated, that doesn't inspire confidence in readers that what's inside will be worth their time.
I will also say this doesn't just apply to self-published authors. I've also seen a huge variety in cover quality between small presses and literary journals, and I would argue it's even more important for these organizations to have professional-looking covers for their books and issues. It isn't just about the individual book, at that point. You're representing yourself to writers as well as readers. If your covers look like you put them together in 20 minutes using Microsoft Paint, a lot of writers are going to be wary about entrusting you with their work.
There's also no excuse for publishers and authors to have terrible book covers at this point, because there are so many tools you can use to design things to at least an acceptable standard without having a shred of visual artistic talent. I speak here from experience. I can't paint or draw worth a damn and I'm an average-at-best photographer. But I have Photoshop and a functional understanding of basic design concepts, and I think I've made some pretty darn good covers for After Happy Hour. So I figured I'd share some of my advice for other non-artist writers and publishers for how to make covers that look professional and will make readers want to see what words come next.
What makes a book look self-published?
Making a book look professional is as much about what to avoid as it is about what to include. In my mind, there are a few common issues I see in book covers that make them look like they were done by an amateur:
The images used are low-quality.
It's especially important to pay attention to the image resolution for printed copies. Even for eBooks or online issues, a low-resolution image will end up looking pixelated and blurry, especially if it’s been resized or it’s placed beside images with a higher resolution. This is a dead giveaway that whoever made it is an inexperienced designer (I say as someone who made this very mistake in some of my early covers).
What image resolution should you use, you ask? If it's printed, use 300 DPI (dots per inch). For eBooks or online publications, the standard is 72 DPI, so you can consider that your minimum.
The typography sucks.
Typography is basically how text is arranged and styled. It includes things like the font, text color, and effects like shadows or borders, as well as how the text is sized and placed on the page. Within this broad category are common mistakes like:
- Text that's illegible because it's too small, the font is too busy, or it's too similar in color to other elements behind it
- Using a basic sans-serif font (Arial, Calibri, etc.) with no styling
- Using a font that doesn't make sense for the content (e.g. Comic Sans for a horror novel cover)
- Using multiple fonts for no discernible reason
- Excessive text effects like glows, drop shadows, 3D text, etc.
- A lack of intent or care in how the text is arranged relative to any images or other design elements
That's certainly not a comprehensive list, but you get the idea. With a book cover, the text is arguably the most important thing, and it shouldn't just look slapped on or like you plopped a five-year-old in front of Photoshop and told them to go wild.
It's too busy.
There's a way to do collage-style covers effectively, but the more elements there are involved in a cover, the more careful you need to be about showing the reader where to direct their attention. There needs to be a focal point that all of the other elements are placed relative and secondary to. Usually this is going to be the title, though you can certainly find examples of book covers where this isn't the case. That's the key, though—something needs to stand out immediately as the most important thing. Otherwise it's just going to look cluttered and make it harder for the reader to figure out what the book is and whether they want to read it.
Poor use of proportion and white space.
Riffing off of that “too busy” point, you definitely don't need to fill up every bit of space with text or an image. But it also looks very amateur when the cover is just solid-colored text on a single-color background, especially if that background color is white. The best covers fall somewhere in between these extremes, and also make smart use of how all the elements are sized and placed relative to each other. If, say, everything on the cover is crammed up into the top half, or the margin is much wider on one side than the other, that makes it look like the designer made a mistake.
...I thought about finding examples for these but that felt a bit mean and call-people-out-ish. But if you want to see the things I'm talking about, just peruse the self-published books available on Amazon and you'll find ample examples of the above sins.
Notice that none of these have anything to do with what you might call “artistic” qualities, except in the most conceptual sense with things like balance and proportion. Yes, a custom image depicting your book's characters or world could be very attractive for the reader. But if you don't have the skills to do that (or the budget to pay someone who can), you can still make an appealing and polished-looking cover if you make smart use of text, color, and other basic design building blocks. Which leads nicely into...
Tips to design professional looking covers as a non-artist
1. Study well-made covers in your genre.
I mentioned one goal of a cover is to tell readers what to expect from the book. They pick up clues from the images, font, color scheme, and overall vibe of the cover about what kind of story this book is telling. For instance, if there are people kissing and the title’s in a cursive font, it’s probably a romance—but if one of those people is a skeleton and the title looks like it's dripping blood, it's probably horror. Different genres also have different expectations about design aspects, like the use of white space and the placement of titles, things the average reader might not consciously register but that send them subtle signals that this book is similar to other ones they've read.
This is why it's worth it to spend some time studying the covers of successful books in your genre. Look at recent best-sellers in your niche online or take a stroll through your genre's section in a bookstore. How many use art versus just words? How often are there characters or scenes on the cover, as opposed to more abstract images? What does the title look like, and where is it usually placed? What about things like the author's name, blurbs, tagline, or other “extras”? Also take note of how the text looks. You can often find the exact name of the font in either the front matter or the back of the book, and if you look the name up online you can get some potentially useful descriptors to clarify the kind of fonts authors similar to you often use.
2. Use the right tools.
I'm the lucky owner of an incredibly outdated but still functional copy of Creative Suite 5, which gives me magic Photoshop and InDesign power. These programs are admittedly not cheap (though if you're running a small press or plan to self-publish many titles, they may still be worth the investment), but there are equivalent free tools you can use instead. My partner uses the free program Inkscape for image design and Affinity for layout, which is a paid program but only costs $70 bucks once (instead of the yearly subscription model of Adobe).
I'm sure there are other cheap-to-free options out there that will let you make a solid book cover. What you don't want to do, though, is just resort to making it in Word or Paint—get a dedicated program that gives you full control over the size, resolution, placement, and design of images and text.
You can supplement these programs with freebie design elements from the internet. Sites like Pixabay and Shutterstock are useful for images. My go-to site for fonts is 1001fonts.com, which has a huge variety of free fonts that are licensed for commercial use. One thing worth noting: some fonts that come with programs like Adobe or Word are only licensed for personal use, not commercial use. Technically, you need to buy a separate license to use that font in something you're going to sell, and while it's highly unlikely that a font maker will ever know that a self-published author or small press used their font, it's safer to just use a commercially licensed one and avoid any potential issues.
3. Study up on design basics.
You don't need to go to school for graphic design to make good looking covers, but it does help to get some kind of education about what makes an image appealing to the eye. There are a lot of ways to get this knowledge for free. The California Institute of Design has an 11-hour Graphic Design Tutorial for Beginners course on YouTube that will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to get started. There are also free classes on sites like Alison Online and Udemy. If you prefer in-person learning, check with your local library, community centers, and arts organizations. You can often find cheap-to-free classes that are open to community members.
4. Know your weaknesses and selectively outsource to fill them.
I'm not necessarily saying you need to hire some for the entire cover design process—although, if you have more discretionary income than you have artistic or design chops, that might ultimately be the best way to go. The cover design absolutely can impact your book's sales, so it's one area that it's definitely worth it to invest in quality. If you don't feel confident that you can design the cover well, and you aren't willing or able to put in enough time to adequately develop those skills, then outsourcing the entire process could be the way to go.
You can also go with a middle approach to cut down on total costs if you have some design skills but aren’t an artist. I get to cheat a bit with the covers for After Happy Hour. We get artwork submitted to us to use in the journal, and we always pick one of those images for the cover. All I have to do is choose the right color and placement for the text around it, but the artist is the one who does most of the heavy lifting.
You can easily hire an artist to create a custom image for you online. Sites like DeviantArt and Behance let you peruse artists' past work to find people whose style matches your book's vibe. For folks on a budget, check with the art schools for any colleges in your area. Student artists will often do work at a lower rate because they need to build their professional portfolio, so you can get excellent work for less than from an established professional. If you're looking for a free option, you could offer a skill exchange—maybe you can help the artist write or edit something like descriptions for a gallery showing or copy for their website, in exchange for art for your book cover.
5. Get feedback on the proof before you go to print.
I suggest this for two reasons. One is the same reason it's helpful for writers to get feedback in general. With anything that you create, you're too close to it to see it truly objectively. There might be issues that you're overlooking, or you may think that certain things are obvious that don't stand out as clearly to an outside viewer.
The second reason, and the reason you want to do this at the physical proof stage, is that sometimes things can look different IRL than they do on the screen. The image resolution may look fine in the PDF but end up blurry on the page, or the color settings on your monitor might make hues look brighter than they really do once they're printed. A physical proof lets you see it as the reader will, and outside opinions help you to do that, too.
One last tip I'll give to wrap up: It's okay to keep things simple. In fact, for some genres, most of the book covers are. A straightforward cover with just the title and the author's name can absolutely work if it's presented the right way. It really comes down to being thoughtful with your design choices and what message they send to the reader.
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