Book Cover Design: how to create a stunning bestseller with creative book design

You’ve finished the book, opened a blank canvas, and now you’re trying to fit the whole story on the front cover.

To design a book cover, start with bestselling books in your genre, choose a simple image and layout, then add text that looks right beside those books.

Before publishing, get feedback and prepare separate files for your ebook and print edition using your publishing platform’s requirements.

The hard part is deciding what to leave out. Your favorite scene, the symbolic necklace, the castle where everything happens… those things matter to you because you’ve read the book. A stranger hasn’t. They need to recognize the kind of story they’re looking for before any of those details mean anything.

How to design a book cover

Start by looking at the books your readers already buy. Be specific. A historical romance and a romantic comedy might both have kissing in them, but that doesn’t mean they should have the same cover.

Look at the images first. Are the covers illustrated or photographic? Do they show faces, whole characters, or mostly text? Then look at how much space the title takes up and what kind of fonts keep appearing.

You’re looking for patterns, not a cover to copy.

Say you write cozy mysteries. Before you choose a dark photograph of somebody running through a city, compare it with the books your readers expect to find beside yours. That image might be perfectly good for a thriller and completely wrong for your book.

This is where authors get frustrated. They’ve been told to be original, so they deliberately avoid anything that looks familiar; then they end up with a cover that needs a paragraph of explanation before anyone can tell what they’re selling (and nobody browsing books is going to stop and ask for that explanation).

A complicated design takes more work, and that work doesn’t help if a simpler cover attracts the right readers faster.

For the basic principles, start with the 7 unbreakable rules of professional book cover design. The cover needs to belong in its genre before it needs to show how clever you are.

How to make a good book cover design

A good cover makes a clear promise about the reading experience. Suspense, romance, something funny or unsettling. The image can be beautiful, but if it promises the wrong kind of book, it’s doing a bad job.

That’s why choosing an image because you love it isn’t enough.

Choose one main idea

Write down your cover ideas, then figure out which one communicates the book most quickly. You can sketch rough layouts before spending time on a finished design. These can be ugly. You’re deciding where things go, not making art yet.

A character against a simple background might be enough. So might a close-up face, or one strong photograph with space for the title. My guide to three book cover design layouts that work shows how much you can do without adding more stuff.

If your idea requires several characters doing different things in several settings, you’ve probably made it too complicated.

The cover doesn’t need to illustrate a complete scene. It needs to make somebody interested enough to read the description.

Find a better image before adding effects

Stock photography is a practical place to start. Shutterstock, iStock and Getty Images are stock libraries to search. Unsplash and Pexels are other places to look, but check the terms for the particular image you want to use rather than assuming anything downloadable is yours to publish.

Choose an image with the right mood and enough quality for the finished cover. A blurry picture doesn’t become professional because you put an expensive font over it.

Also look at where the text will go. An image can be gorgeous by itself and awkward as a cover because every part of it is busy. If the title has to fight branches, faces and bright patches of light, try another picture.

You can commission photography or an illustration if stock doesn’t fit. Upwork and Fiverr are places to look for people doing that work. Judge their samples against the kind of cover you actually need, and agree on what you’re getting before commissioning it.

Follow the image’s licensing terms, including any required credit. Don’t assume putting a photographer’s name somewhere gives you permission to use their picture.

Use color to support the mood

A dark, moody image can suit a thriller. A lighter treatment might suit a romantic comedy. But those are starting points, not rules that every book in a broad category has to follow.

Go back to your comparison covers. Look at the colors used together, how light or dark the whole cover feels, and where the strongest contrast sits. A color that works beautifully on one cover can disappear against a different background.

You can simplify a photograph with a more unified color treatment. Sometimes making most of the image gray and keeping one colored element works. Sometimes a small adjustment is enough. Don’t keep adding effects just because the software has more buttons.

Give the text a job

The title is part of the design. It shouldn’t look like something pasted on after the picture was finished.

A bold sans-serif might work for a thriller. A more traditional serif might suit historical fiction. Garamond, Baskerville, Futura and Helvetica are fonts you can consider, but none of them is automatically the right answer for your book.

Compare the lettering with other covers in your genre. Pay attention to spacing and placement as well as the font itself. My guide to book cover fonts by genre will give you somewhere to start.

Then decide what matters most. Usually the title needs more attention than the author name, but that doesn’t mean your name should be tiny and apologetic. Look at how other authors in your genre handle it.

Everything can’t be the biggest thing on the cover.

If you also have a series name, subtitle or tagline, let some of that text be smaller. Trying to make every word equally noticeable is how you end up with a cover that feels like it’s shouting several different things at once.

How to create a book cover

Once you have a simple concept, choose software you can actually use. Learning a complicated program and learning cover design at the same time is a lot to take on.

Canva is one option for beginners. Photoshop gives you more control over image editing, and Illustrator is useful for vector artwork. GIMP is a free, open-source image editor. InDesign is another design tool, particularly worth considering when you’re also working on the book’s layout.

The software won’t make the design decisions for you.

I built my online cover editor so authors could work with layers, fonts and effects without buying Photoshop. Having the right tools still won’t stop you from making an ugly cover.

Build the layout before polishing it

Place your image, title and author name first. Get those working together before adding decorations or smaller text.

Leave some empty space. It doesn’t have to be white. A quiet area of sky, a dark background or an uncluttered part of the photograph can give the title somewhere to sit.

That space is doing useful work. Filling it with another object because it looks empty can make the whole cover worse.

A centered layout can work well. An off-center composition can work too. Don’t assume symmetry means boring or that moving everything to one side makes it sophisticated. Look at where your eye goes and what gets lost.

If the text is hard to read, try moving it onto a quieter area or changing its contrast with the background. Don’t immediately add outlines, shadows and more effects until the letters look like they’re wearing armor.

Look at it small

Your cover needs to work as a small image on a retailer’s page. Shrink it down and see what survives. Can you still recognize the main image? Does it look like the right genre?

This doesn’t mean every word must be readable at thumbnail size. People can read the title beside the cover on the sales page. Making all the text huge can ruin a design that needs a quieter mood.

The small version needs an immediate emotional effect. If shrinking it turns your carefully arranged scene into a muddy blob, simplify the scene.

Ask useful questions when getting feedback

“Do you like it?” isn’t much help. Somebody can like a pretty picture and still have no idea what kind of book it belongs to.

Show the cover to people who read your genre. Ask what kind of book they think it is and what mood they expect. You can also ask a cover designer for feedback on the design.

If readers keep guessing the wrong genre, pay attention. Explaining why your image makes sense in chapter twenty won’t fix what they see on the cover.

Book cover design tips

The last part is less exciting than choosing the art, but it matters. A cover that looks good in your editor still needs to fit the format you’re publishing.

Decide which editions you’re making

An ebook needs a front cover. A paperback needs the full cover, including the spine and back. A hardcover may involve a dust jacket, which wraps around the book and has its own layout requirements.

Think about those editions before calling the design finished. If you only build the front, you still have work to do when it’s time to prepare the print version.

Use your printer or publishing platform’s specifications for the actual dimensions. Don’t guess based on another book that looks about the same size.

Prepare the file the printer asks for

Keep a high-resolution version of the design. PDF or TIFF may be suitable for some uses, but the format you submit needs to match the requirements of the place receiving it. Your ebook platform and your printer may ask for different files.

For print, check the bleed. This is the extra artwork extending beyond the edge where the cover will be trimmed. A picture that stops exactly at the intended edge leaves no room for variation in the cut.

Crop marks indicate where trimming happens. Add them only if your printer asks for them, and follow its instructions for the bleed area. Don’t add marks just because they look like something a professional file ought to have.

Check the full print cover, including the spine and back, rather than spending all your attention on the front.

Choose how you’ll print it

Print-on-demand through a service such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing lets you print copies as needed. That can make sense when you don’t know how many books you’ll sell.

A local print shop is another option. A larger run may work out cheaper per copy, but you need to compare quotes and think about handling the books and distribution yourself.

Choose the printer before preparing the final print file, so you’re designing to its requirements instead of rebuilding things afterward.

Before you export, check the title and author name again. Read the back cover text separately from the design. Familiar words are easy to skim past, especially when you’ve spent the whole afternoon moving them around.