Book Cover Designer: How to Hire One, or Do It Yourself

You need a cover, and you’re stuck between paying a designer and doing it yourself. Hire a designer if you can afford a good one; if you can’t, the free tools below will get you a real cover, as long as you know what a designer would have done so you can check your own work.

One thing up front: I’m not a neutral source. Creativindie Covers is my own design studio, and its prices are the only ones I’ll quote here, because they’re the only ones I can vouch for. (Yes, it’s a bit like asking the barber if you need a haircut; read the rest with that in mind.)

What a book cover designer does

A book cover designer makes your book look like it belongs on the shelf next to the bestsellers in your genre, then hands over files the retailer or printer will accept. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and “makes it pretty” is the smallest part of the job.

• Genre research: knowing what covers in your genre look like right now, so yours reads as one of the gang in a blink (I’ve written that a cover is about membership, not aesthetics)
• Typography: the fonts that fit the genre, and what gets the most size (for a first-time author that’s usually the title, then your name, then everything else small)
• Images: one or two brilliant pictures instead of a mediocre one that needs fixing, changed enough that your cover isn’t identical to the next one using the same stock photo
• Blending two images so nobody sees the seam, which I’ve called the hardest (but most common) thing to do
• Licensing: you must have the rights to everything on your cover, images and fonts both
• The print wrap: back, spine and front as one file, with the spine worked out from your page count and paper (I go through the back in book back cover design)

A good one will also talk you out of the six-character scene in your head. Years ago I wrote that unless you know what you’re doing, even a hired cover can look good to you and still not sell the book, which is why I said not to trust your instincts.

How much does a book cover designer cost?

In 2013 I wrote that a good cover costs between $500 and $1000, and in a 2024 post I said I charge around $800 for custom covers. Those are old numbers. What other designers charge is on their own sites and I’m not going to guess at it; here is what my studio charges now.

• The Debut, $349: a custom front cover for ebooks (no paperback wrap), one cover concept, three rounds of revisions, one free 3D mockup and a back-cover blurb edit
• The Bestseller, $549: a full print wrap with spine and back (Amazon, IngramSpark and bookstore-ready), ISBN barcode included, three free 3D mockups
• The Chart-Topper, $849: the cover, formatting and a launch kit

The main jump from $349 to $549 is the print wrap, since the Debut is the front only. Real cover samples come within 10 days, there’s a 100% money-back guarantee, and a 365-day warranty (doesn’t sell, redesign free).

How to choose a book cover designer

Here is what I’d check before hiring a cover designer for self-publishing.

Open the portfolio and look only at your genre. Say you write cozy mysteries: you want covers that look like the cozy mysteries that are selling, and if the whole portfolio is moody literary stuff, move on however nice it is. A cover has to say its genre in a blink.

Ask what’s included, in writing: front cover only or the full wrap, how many rounds of revisions, and who licensed the images and fonts. “We use stock photos” is not a licensing answer by itself.

Ask whether they use AI art. KDP wants you to disclose AI-generated content when you publish, and it counts cover images: if an AI tool created the art you disclose it, even if you edited it a lot afterward, while art you made yourself with AI only helping to refine it needs no disclosure. Ask every designer, mine included.

Ask to see real work before you commit. My studio sends real cover samples within 10 days.

Then test what you get. Put it next to the bestsellers in your genre at thumbnail size, and run it through my free “Does my book cover suck?” critique for a fast second opinion. A cover you love and nobody else likes is the expensive kind of mistake, and a cover you paid for can be exactly that.

How to brief a book cover designer

Years ago I wrote that explaining what you want to a designer can be tricky, that you’ll wait for revisions, and that you might not love the result. I also wrote that figuring out what you want first saves a lot of time. A brief is how you do that.

1. Your genre, as specifically as you can (cozy mystery, not just mystery).
2. Three to five covers of bestsellers in that genre that yours should sit next to, with a note on what you like about each: the fonts, the colors, the layout.
3. The title, subtitle and author name, exactly as they should print. Settle the title before the cover starts: I’ve written that a vague one-word title makes the art do all the work, while a long descriptive one lets it do less.
4. Where it will be sold. Ebook only means a front cover; if there’s a paperback, the designer needs the trim size, the page count and the paper, because those set the spine (the math is in KDP cover size).

What I’d leave out is the big scene: the six characters, three settings and the exact color of the heroine’s necklace. Write it down to get it out of your system, then drop it. One strong image beats it, and the cover’s job is to attract the right reader, not to explain the book.

Free book cover designer

There’s no free human designer in this post, sorry; designers get paid for their time. What’s free is doing it yourself, and I’ve built a few tools for that.

• The free AI book cover generator. You choose the image engine: Ideogram (premium quality, 3 free covers per day), OpenAI DALL-E 3 (standard quality, unlimited free covers) or GPT-4o; upscaling and remixing use credits. I built it because I figured I might as well make the best one before somebody else did, and I pay for every generation.
• The free online cover editor, with layers, fonts, effects, templates and preset sizes for 6×9 and 5×8 covers, for when you’d rather start from your own picture.
• The free 3D book mockup tool, which people have used millions of times to turn a flat cover into a 3D book image.

I’ve said the AI results are ALMOST good enough to be a whole cover, but they’ll probably get the text and fonts wrong, so check the title first. And if AI makes the art, KDP’s disclosure applies to you too.

Start with the 7 unbreakable rules of professional book cover design (from a talk I went to at the London Book Fair, and I strenuously second every one). If you want a head start on layout and fonts, I have six free Word cover templates and seven free video lessons (genre research, images, fonts, full print cover, promotion) here.

A middle option between free and custom is a premade cover, a finished design that you put your own title and name on. This site has a post on finding the perfect fit in premade book covers. It has to already look like your genre; a premade you have to bend into shape is the wrong one.

Ebook cover designer

An ebook only needs a front cover, and that’s the cheaper job. In my studio that’s the Debut at $349, while the full wrap is $549 because you’re paying for the back and the spine, so if you only sell ebooks there’s no reason to pay for a wrap.

Print later and you’ll need one then.

Ask what size file you’ll get. KDP’s ideal ebook cover is 2,560 pixels tall by 1,600 wide, and the rest of the specs are in ebook cover design.

Also ask to see the cover small. I’ve written that people don’t read the text on a thumbnail; they read the text beside it, or click the image if the cover is good enough. So an ebook cover designer has to make the picture do the work at a tiny size.

PS) Making a free cover with the generator first is a decent way to work out your brief; you’ll know what you like before you pay anyone to guess… and guessing is the expensive part.