Everyone knows the adage “Never judge a book by its cover,” meaning, don’t assume something is a certain way just by looking at it. But who hasn’t gone into a bookstore, looked at a book cover, and made assumptions about the book without even reading the synopsis? Self publishers who want to be successful when competing with traditionally published authors will need covers at the same quality of their professionally designed covers, which is why I’m blogging about cover design.
Cover design may seem like a negligible part of the self publishing process. After all, when you line it up against editing, formatting, and listing it on Amazon, it seems like more of a side project. But it is just as important as any other part in the process. Covers are built in marketing, and send messages to potential readers about your book’s storyline, content, and quality at first glance. Self-published authors have to ensure that their books’ covers are not shoddily thrown together, or else they may send the wrong message.
There’s even a website, Lousy Book Covers, dedicated to showcasing bad covers. Though the site may be mean-spirited, many of the covers are truly of poor quality. These covers are off-putting to potentials readers, who may assume that if the cover is amateurish, the writing may be amateurish as well. Though this is an unfair assumption, it’s understandable that someone shopping for a book may want to save their money for something they can see has had a lot of effort put into all aspects of it.
So how do you design a high quality book cover? Well, there is always the option of hiring someone else to do it. There are many resources online offering to design your covers for a fee, but you’ll have to make sure that they are legitimate companies. You can also do it yourself, but be sure to follow these tips:
Hope this was helpful. :)
Cover design may seem like a negligible part of the self publishing process. After all, when you line it up against editing, formatting, and listing it on Amazon, it seems like more of a side project. But it is just as important as any other part in the process. Covers are built in marketing, and send messages to potential readers about your book’s storyline, content, and quality at first glance. Self-published authors have to ensure that their books’ covers are not shoddily thrown together, or else they may send the wrong message.
There’s even a website, Lousy Book Covers, dedicated to showcasing bad covers. Though the site may be mean-spirited, many of the covers are truly of poor quality. These covers are off-putting to potentials readers, who may assume that if the cover is amateurish, the writing may be amateurish as well. Though this is an unfair assumption, it’s understandable that someone shopping for a book may want to save their money for something they can see has had a lot of effort put into all aspects of it.
So how do you design a high quality book cover? Well, there is always the option of hiring someone else to do it. There are many resources online offering to design your covers for a fee, but you’ll have to make sure that they are legitimate companies. You can also do it yourself, but be sure to follow these tips:
- Before you take any pictures or pick any fonts, decide what message you wish to send. Think about the emotion that your book is portraying, then pick your images and color palette. For example, you wouldn’t pick pink for a murder mystery (unless the detective has a weakness for shopping), and you wouldn’t pick a dark color for a book about tween girls trying to buy concert tickets.
- When picking colors, avoid using too many, as that can be distracting. It’s also helpful to use the color wheel when picking colors, to see which colors go together nicely.
- In a similar vessel to deciding upon a message, make sure that people can tell what genre your book is by looking at the cover. I’ve learned firsthand that if an author puts a cover that makes a book seem like a frothy romance on a dark book about unhealthy relationships, it’s annoying at best and sends a bad message about that author’s morals at worst. And an all black cover doesn’t do a good job of portraying a fun, frothy beach read, either.
- Be careful with the stock photos and fonts that you choose. Some can ruin your book’s visual credibility, especially if someone else has used that image on their book cover. But if you DO decide on using a stock photo, be sure to download the copy that has an “extended license”-or, in other words, allows you to use it as a book cover. It’s more expensive, but will prevent you from dealing with some nasty copyright issues down the road.
- Get creative in obtaining cover art. You can look around on Flickr, DeviantArt, Etsy, and other places to find, images, artists, and more. Don’t be afraid to reach out, because there are hundreds of young artists eager to help you out with your work.
Hope this was helpful. :)