The Self-Published Author’s Book Cover Design Guide »

The Self-Published Author’s Book Cover Design Guide

Writing her book, not yet ready for a book cover design guide

The face your book shows to the world

Self-published authors are used to doing things in-house. Over the course of a typical business day they can wear many hats: writer, editor, marketer, salesman, secretary, web designer, and bookkeeper. The addition of one more — book cover designer — doesn’t sound unreasonable, except that in order to take on that new role these authors must willfully ignore the chorus of voices warning them not to.

The main argument against a writer designing his or her own book cover can be boiled down to this: your cover is too important to take that risk.

The importance of a book’s cover is well documented. Studies show the cover and title are the top two factors determining whether someone buys a book. Potential readers, in other words, will judge your book by its cover. This isn’t a bad thing, really, but just a necessary shortcut in modern life. And readers take that short cut all the time, assuming a qualitative consistency between cover and content. Thus, if a cover appears amateurish, the reader will assume the book content was written in a similar slapdash manner, and will think twice about spending their hard-earned money on it.

A good cover will sell a bad book, but even a great book won’t sell with a lousy cover. So if you’re relying on the brilliance of your words to overcome a book cover that’s mediocre, that’s not very likely. More likely is your masterpiece will languish undiscovered in the bowels of the Amazon’s store, their algorithms no longer offering it to shoppers because shoppers don’t want it.

Assuming you’re as skilled at graphic design as you are at writing (which is a pretty rare combo), without direct experience designing book covers, the cover you design for your own book probably won’t be as good as one created by someone skilled in that art. If you care about sales, it’s probably best that you leave the cover design to the pros.

There are a few different directions you can go when it comes to cover artwork for your book. Let’s explore the options.

Option 1: hire a book designer

Hiring a freelance book designer is the typical path authors take for their covers. A designer-created custom cover can be pricey, though, up to around $1,200, but according to Reedsy, $500-$800 is about the average. When it comes to finding one, Reedsy maintains a curated list of qualified book designers, responsible for the below mosaic of covers. It is a great resource.

There are many benefits to hiring a book designer. They can help with not only the cover, but the fonts used for the book text, the layout of chapters, and the use of interior graphics that will impart a finished, high-end look to your book. A custom-made cover means no one else will have your book cover, which is always a concern when using a template or stock photography.

An experienced designer will be well versed in the design conventions of each genre and the rules of the various self-publishing platforms, which can become a bit dense. They can produce a professional cover in a fraction of the time an author with little experience could. Hiring one lets you concentrate on what you presumably do best: writing.

professional book covers in this book cover design guide

Where Not to Find a Freelance Designer

Speak of inexpensive graphic design, and you probably think of Isreal’s Fiverr, the largest freelance web site by far. We do not, however, encourage authors (or anyone else, for that matter) to utilize that billion-dollar gig economy company. It exploits freelancers working on the platform, devalues them to the extent that a designer with steady work from Fiverr will likely live below the poverty level. The lowest-bidder focus encourages piracy, forgery, and other violations of copyright. It’s a shady service with a lot of shady freelancers. Caveat emptor.

When price is a concern, freelancer sites like Upwork or Freelancer have less expensive designers, but be aware that if you do go with the lowest bid for your project, you should adjust your expectations regarding the quality of the design you receive. If you don’t perceive quality differences between levels of bids you receive, then you need to attempt to verify the art you receive isn’t stolen from elsewhere.

Freelancers on the above-mentioned sites claim they are forced to steal other designers’ works because the brutal competition among designers leads to bids so low that profiting from them isn’t otherwise possible. It goes without saying that even though you were not the bad actor in such a scenario, you won’t be owner of the intellectual property you paid for, since it was stolen. Thus, you have no right to publish, print, or otherwise use the artwork.

Your contract with a designer

When an author hires a designer, they should sign a work-for-hire agreement before any design takes place, according to attorney Cathryn Goldman. That agreement will cover the rules for the author’s use of the artist’s work, to which the artist holds the copyright. The agreement will be a license granting the author the right to use the artist’s work. It may put limits on the use of that artwork, stipulating for instance how many physical copies can be made.

Assuming the artist created the cover using wholly original assets, then he retains the copyright to his artwork, and the copyright page of the author’s book should reflect that fact. However, the artist can execute a copyright transfer as a separate document that will transfer ownership of the cover and its copyright to the author.

If the artist did not use wholly original assets in creating the book cover — for instance if he used stock photography — then issues of licensing become more complex. See the info box below on intellectual property and licensing.

An agreement with a designer should always have a stipulation stating that the artist’s work was all original or properly licensed.

Option 2: pre-made designs

An author can save money by selecting a do-it-yourself, pre-designed cover from a site like Book Design Templates or Cormar Covers. These are high-quality covers in a wide variety of styles and genres (see image above). Purchase a design for $200-$300 and the artist will often edit it according to your needs, although at that price the number of edits will be limited (three bites at the apple seems to be common). Once a cover is sold a set number of times, designers will pull that design from inventory, so you won’t have to worry about another book being released with your cover.

professional templates in this book cover design guide

Option 3: editable book cover designs

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my own designs, shown below. These were on sale at Etsy and may be re-listed on that site, but there are other artists creating book covers you can edit yourself. These are good starting point for DIY types.

Canva has a large inventory of book cover designs that can also be used as templates, although they are a bit more generic and less edgy than the designs below. Still, starting as low as $0, the price is right. In either case, this is the least expensive way to go. The below designs were priced as low as $10.

inexpensive Cana templates in this book cover design guide

Option 4: design it yourself

There are many reasons one might want to design the cover of his or her own book. If the beginning of this blog post didn’t dissuade you from that complicated task, the following is a crash course in book cover design, useful if you’re designing your cover from scratch or using a Canva template as a starting point.

Know your genre

Each genre of book has a style, typography, and imagery that typifies it. These visual cues convey to the reader a ton of information: not only genre, but mood, theme, and often elements of the story line. It’s important to understand the “design vocabulary” of your chosen genre so your cover aligns with the expectations of your readers. If they don’t, your readers will become confused, and confused customers are more likely to move on to the next book in their queue than to try to decipher why the Erotic Romance title before them resembles an Agatha Christie mystery, for instance.

By becoming steeped in the conventions of your genre, you won’t make this mistake. Study the book covers for the top 50 books of your genre on Amazon and make note of the design elements they have in common: typeface, size or prominence of the title and author name, colors used, common imagery, whether the design is abstract or realistic, etc. Then when you begin designing your cover, try to use some some or all of these commonalities. Your readers expect it.

Below is a list of several fiction genres and some of the design and imagery conventions you will often see on their covers.

GENRE	DESIGN CHARACTERISTICS
Comedy	Cartoon-like drawings or comic book-like imagery vs. realistic imagery or photographs.
Contemporary	Book title and author fonts tend to use a sans-serif font (usually all-caps or title face).
Crime	Overly large text for book title and author generally in a sans-serif font (usually all caps).
	Dark, foreboding imagery such as a shadowy figure or a bullet hole in glass.
	Dark colors are most common.
Erotica	A sexy shirtless man or scantily clad woman figure prominently.
	Serif fonts and fancy, florid, cursive fonts are most common.
	For heterosexual erotica, juxtaposition of a typically more male typeface (sans-serif) for one word of the title and a typically more female typeface (florid, cursive or fancy) symbolize the drama inherent in these two opposing types of energy coming together.
	Dark colors are most common.
Historic	Book title and author tend to use a serif font or a decorative, fancy cursive font.
Romance	Book title and author often use an elegant, handwritten font (lower case or title case).
	Book title and author often use a combination of a florid font and a sans-serif font (usually in all caps). See Erotica entry above.

Choose the right tool

There are some excellent tools that are very easy to use and tailor-made for designing book covers, such as Canva and Adobe Express. These apps have a ton of templates to use as a starting point, and a lot of options for adding and customizing images and artwork.

Both Canva and Express have free versions, but because of licensing issues, you’ll probably need to upgrade to their paid versions in order to use your design. Adobe Express is currently competitively priced at $49.99 per year and Canva Pro (the tool I prefer) is $120 per year.

Amazon provides a free tool called Cover Creator but the version of it at press time isn’t worth your time, unless for some reason you want your book cover to look like a Powerpoint slide circa 20 years ago.

Intellectual property and licensing

If you’re designing a Romance book cover and want a shirtless man on it, for instance, you have a few options: (1) hire a photographer to take such a photo, who will then transfer his copyright to you or grant you a license to use is in your cover, (2) take a photo yourself (obtaining a release granting permission from the model in order to use it), or (3) take the easier route by using stock photography.

Using stock photos can be tricky, too, though: there’s always the danger that the stock photo has already been used in another book, or will be in the future. Also, different stock photo companies handle licensing of their photos differently. Always make sure you read and understand the license you’re being granted.

If the artist did not use wholly original assets in creating the book cover — for instance if he used stock photography — then issues of licensing become more complex. The artist will own only limited rights to the stock photo he used, which will be transferred to the author via their word-for-hire agreement.

If the author misused or misunderstood the license provided by the third party vendor, it could constitute an infringement for which the author is ultimately responsible. For this reason, Goldman recommends the author insist the artist provide a provision in the contract warranting that his work is either original or properly licensed. Goldman’s article at the Creative Law Center provides much more information on intellectual property rights and book cover creation.

Learn Design Fundamentals

Successful book covers generally utilize one or two modern, clean fonts in a variety of sizes for emphasis. They use striking, contrasting colors and contain no more than two images. Be aware that your finished cover must be attractive and readable not only at full size but also as a thumbnail. Unfortunately, most customers will only ever see your book cover as a thumbnail, so watch your font sizes, keep the cover simple enough that it reduces well, and test print your cover at various sizes.

An understanding of the symbolism of certain imagery or how colors relate to emotions can be helpful, but some of this can be picked up simply by studying successful book covers in your genre. However, the below color table might be a good reference.

COLOR	SYMBOLISM/ASSOCIATIONS
Red	extremes, love, seduction, violence, adventure, energy, danger, anger
Pink	femininity, innocence, friendship, affection, harmony, approachability
Purple	creativity, luxury, mystery, unconventionality, royalty
Green	nature, balance, good luck, health, jealousy
Blue	openness, serenity, trustworthiness, inspiration, wisdom, calm, reliability
Orange	warmth, optimism, freedom, playfulness, lack of intellect, bad taste
Gray	neutrality, balance, depression, loss
Black	fear, mystery, strength, elegance, authority, sophistication, evil, aggression

Follow the KDP specs

To self-publish on Amazon, you need to join Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP. Amazon provides a wealth of essential information to guide the creation of your book, and one KDP tool that is indispensable for creating a print version of your book is its Paperback Cover Templates page. Insert a few key pieces of information about your book and KDP will provide a downloadable template upon which you can place your cover. You will then create your book spine and back cover, following the guidelines and allowing room for a bar code of your ISBN number.

You’ll need some familiarity with creating and manipulating layers in image editing software, and you’ll need to own software, such as Photoshop, that can do so. A great open-source image editor that’s an alternative to the very expensive Photoshop is called GIMP. It’s available for essentially every operating system, and it’s a free download. If working with layers and placing your cover on a template such as the one below sounds too technical, it’s not too late to go back to options 1 or 2 above.

KDP cover template in this book cover design guide

Weigh your Options

Now it’s time to weigh your options, taking into consideration your budget, how important book sales are to you, and how much pride you get from doing everything yourself. Once you’ve decided on a cover and implemented a design, kudos to you, you deserve to celebrate. And the great thing is, your cover isn’t carved in stone. It’s extremely easy to publish a new edition with a newer, better cover, down the road.

Then it’s possible your first cover and first book edition becomes a collector’s item. I look forward to seeing your book in the virtual aisles of Amazon and elsewhere, and hopefully on a bestseller list as well.