Every author today must think about the cover of their book sometime before it’s finished. Everyone knows you can’t judge the contents by the cover, but if the book’s cover doesn’t look right, it may never get an audience. Today, more than ever, first impressions are crucial to capturing interest enough for a potential reader to take a chance and start to read the book. Although you would always expect first-time authors to have this challenge, well-known authors sometimes struggle. Everyone wants their book cover to stand out from the others.
Essential Elements for a Book Cover
Designing a book cover can often lead the new author down the proverbial rabbit hole where it initially seemed promising but became confusing, time-consuming, and difficult to back out of. Like any journey or quest, a book cover must be planned before you start its construction. Here are some essential design elements to include in your book cover.
Make it Eye Catching
This seems obvious. You want your cover to stand out, but how do you do that? Start with your imagination and let it take you to a place without constraints – any picture, illustration, symbol, graphic, or abstraction are all in play. Use color to highlight or subdue, culminating in a rich, provocative cover that best represents your book. You can use almost any artistic application, such as Microsoft Paint or Apple Paintbrush. You don’t need anything more sophisticated at this step. The goal is to create something from scratch that best represents your book’s spirit. No matter your genre, the book cover has to be eye-catching.
Originality
Although tempting, you should refrain from using other successful book covers as a template for your own. One of the fallbacks of the digital age is the ease of cloning digital images, making slight changes to avoid copyright infringement, and calling it your own. Yes, some genres have a familiar look and feel to their book covers. Even if you are lucky enough to be published by a mainstream publisher, I strongly encourage you to work closely with the cover designers to create a unique and provocative cover that best represents the work inside.
Promote What's Inside
Only feature something on the book cover directly connected to what’s inside. You won’t have a bottle of wine on the cover of a book describing the history of beer. Any illustrations or pictures should complement what’s inside. If your protagonist is bald, then either show it boldly or hide it under a hat. If your antagonist is overweight, then let it be known as well. There is a tendency to make your story character’s appearance appealing. Please don’t fall into that trap because it will give a false initial impression to the reader, which can only lead to confusion when they read a different description later. You might compromise by showing wide-angle shots with characters turned away so you never see any physical feature up close, just silhouettes walking toward something in the background.
Keep It Simple
Following the guidelines above might make your book cover overly complicated, but that is not what I advocate. Simplicity is vital to quickly communicating the essence of your written work to a potential reader. Complicated depictions distort your intentions and confuse potential readers. Shave away any unnecessary elements; strive for only what is critical to describe or illustrate your work. Include only a few words on the front cover. You want all the appeal in the graphics and pictures, not in wordy descriptions. For the back cover, it is reasonable to include some verbiage about you or the book’s content, but that’s all.
Size Title and Your Name Appropriately
For new writers, the title of your book needs to be prominent on the cover, but your name is not so much. The more well-known you are, the larger the font your name deserves. Any book by Stephen King or Colleen Hoover has their names front and center on the cover, often dwarfing the actual book title. The font of your name should be much smaller than the title of your book, almost invisible. You don’t want it to distract from the title or theme of the cover. I know new writers tend to have their names prominently displayed, but as a relatively unknown author, you don’t want to draw too much attention to that. One more thing here: don’t include ‘by” next to your name; it’s assumed and will appear amateurish.
Online Book Cover Design Tools
Various book cover design tools are available online. The most popular for new authors are those provided as part of an overall book creation application like Ingram Spark or Kindle Direct Publishing. See the links below for more information about those.
Depending on your skill set, you might try independent book cover design applications like Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, or Canva. Each one offers some guidance and direction on how to create book covers.
However, no matter what application you ultimately choose to create your book cover, take the time to develop your design first, incorporating the elements described above.