Let’s be honest, we all judge a book by its cover most of the time (and there are legions of blogs dedicated to the pastime). Books with good graphics, eye-catching font and good quality covers sell more copies than those without – simple fact. Despite what some people say, book covers are not in decline.
Book cover design is booming and even has its own awards. Design Observer promotes an annual award for book cover design with a 35-person judging panel! The traditional process of getting a book cover design can be extremely time-consuming and the result is often disappointing for the author. This is all changing with the digital age ushering in an era of author-led e-book publishing and with a little help from crowd sourcing.
New Way To Design Covers
The Internet has also enabled fast and effective circulation and exchange of documents, ideas and feedback. Now that people can ‘Pin’, ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ graphics, (in other words help advertise your book!) communities of book lovers (and design lovers) are sharing their favorite book covers across the Web.
The same activity is becoming commonplace among designers and authors, sharing book covers for feedback before they go to publishing. We’re going to take a look at how book cover designs come to be.
For easy reference, take the shortcut:
Designing A Concept
Before you get started on creating a brief for a cover design, or before starting to design one yourself, you need to decide on the message you want to send.
Ask yourself: What is the book’s single-minded value proposition? What is the target audience of readers looking for – Inspiration and Aspiration, Success and Achievement, Knowledge and Power, Romance and Passion, Murder and Revenge?
Boiling it down to the motivation, incentive and emotion will help you generate tons of ideas or visual metaphors that determine the imagery, choice of color palette, typography, and layout that help you capture what the book is all about.
If you want to design your own book cover or if you've just had yours crowd sourced, here’s a list of useful tips and tricks to consider for the design, tutorials and graphic inspiration for your project. Good luck!
Book Cover Design Tips
Generate excitement. Grab attention. The main goal of every book cover is togenerate excitement. The cover is one of the best tools in your marketing arsenal. That’s why you should create something that will stop people in their tracks and evoke interest. The book cover is the hook that will help you to promote your book.
The book’s genre is important
The book cover should show what genre the book is. Look at these two book covers. It is an easy task to understand what kind of books are in front of you, right? A really good book cover “talks” to its readers through choice of typography, imagery and metaphor.
If your book is non-fiction, its cover should communicate the tone of the book. Pay attention to its scope. It is really cool when the book cover explains the scope of the book allowing the reader to manage her time.
Minimalism: Less is more!
Minimal style is timeless. It helps to focus on the book’s title and authors name.
Clown Girl, A Novel by Monica Drake, Hawthorn Press
Oil: A Concise Guide to the Most Important Product on Earth by Matthew Yeomans
An Ethics of Interrogation by Michael Skerker
Ugly Man: Stories (P.S.) by Dennis Cooper
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns
How to do it wrong
It is good practice to look at bad design examples too. In fact crap, trashy book covers has become a meme in itself, whether it’s the romance genre or the aptly titled ‘funny as shit book covers’ board on Pinterest. Unfortunately there are so many bad cover designs.
Over-wrought and over-thought typography is the main offender but using stock imagery can also destroy a book’s visual credibility. Be careful with fonts and stock images.
Stop! Fighter jets? Maybe, I haven’t read this book carefully…
It’s erm… erm… I got no comments.
Book Cover Design Tutorials
Create a Realistic Book Cover in Photoshop
Look at this step-by-step Photoshop video tutorial and see how easily the book cover design process could be!
Look at this step-by-step Photoshop video tutorial and see how easily the book cover design process could be!
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