You’ve finished the book, and now you need a cover. You probably have a pretty clear picture of what should be on it (possibly several pictures, all fighting for space).
Authors make book covers by hiring a designer or designing their own, starting with the genre and intended readers, then choosing images and typography and revising the result.
How long it takes depends on the design and revisions; getting initial samples is only part of the process, not the same as having a finished cover.
How do authors make their book covers
Some authors hire a professional. Others use templates or design tools and do the work themselves. Either way, somebody needs to figure out what kind of cover will appeal to the people who actually buy books like yours.
That’s the part you can’t skip.
You can explain every detail of your character’s appearance and still end up with a cover that looks like crap. Getting the details right doesn’t help much if readers can’t tell it’s a romance, or mistake your thriller for a memoir.
I’ve spent years trying to make DIY cover tools easy enough that authors can’t screw them up, and still struggled with authors making ugly covers anyway. Apparently having the right tools doesn’t magically turn everyone into a designer (which would have saved me a lot of work).
If you want help, my custom cover design service starts at $349 for an ebook front cover or $549 for a full print wrap, with samples within 10 days. Give your designer useful information about the book and its readers, then leave room for them to solve the design problem.
Put your title on a cover. Then make it your own.
Six free Word cover templates and seven short video lessons on genre, images and fonts, so you’re not starting from a blank page.
Book cover design process
Start by looking at other books in your genre. What do their covers have in common? Pay attention to the images, but also the mood and how much space the title takes up. A beautiful picture with the wrong text can still make a terrible cover.
Figure out what the cover needs to communicate
Say you write cozy mysteries. Your cover needs to attract cozy mystery readers before it needs to show the exact building where the murder happens. The setting can help, but accuracy isn’t the whole job.
Write down the genre and intended audience. Include a short description of the book, any details that really matter, and examples of covers aimed at similar readers. Those examples give a designer something much more useful than “make it look professional.”
Choose a simple direction
Don’t try to fit the whole book onto the cover.
A character against a background might work. So might one strong image with simple text. These three book cover layouts are a useful place to start if you’re staring at an empty canvas and adding things because you don’t know what else to do.
You may have a great idea involving several characters and an important object from the ending; but readers haven’t read the book yet, so all those meaningful details are just more stuff to look at (and more opportunities for the design to fall apart).
Work on the text with the image
The title isn’t something to slap on after the artwork is finished. It needs space, and its style needs to fit the genre. Check the book cover fonts by genre before picking a font just because you like it.
Decide what matters most. If every bit of text is huge, nothing gets priority. Color and contrast should help direct attention, rather than make every element compete.
How long does it take to design a book cover
There isn’t one useful deadline for every book cover. A simple image with clean text is a different job from a complicated design, and revisions can change the schedule.
Simple doesn’t mean bad. Sometimes the best cover is the one that needs LESS work.
When you hire a designer, ask when you’ll receive the first concepts and what happens after that. Leave time to review them and request changes. Don’t treat the date for initial samples as your final delivery date.
If you’re doing it yourself, separate making the cover from judging it. You can spend hours adjusting tiny details without fixing the thing that’s actually wrong: the image doesn’t communicate the genre, or the typography doesn’t belong with it.
How to make a good book cover design
Compare your draft with books your readers already buy. Does it look like it belongs beside them? The seven rules of professional book cover design explain this better than trying to judge whether a cover is simply “nice.”
Look at it small, too. The cover needs to have an impact as a thumbnail, but that doesn’t mean every word needs to be readable. Making all the text bigger can ruin the image and the mood.
Then ask for feedback from people who read your genre. “What kind of book does this look like?” is more useful than “Do you like it?” Someone can love your artwork and have absolutely no interest in your book.
Your next cover doesn’t have to start with a blank page.
My DIY Book Design bundle has 150 editable Word cover templates (80 fiction, 70 nonfiction), the formatting downloads and five courses. It’s $197; through this link it’s $39. The cheapest time to fix a cover is before you pay to promote the book.
If it isn’t useful, email support within 30 days for a full refund.
If you’re comparing two versions, you can show both to your audience or test which gets more clicks. Keep track of what changed between them, so the result tells you something useful. And if readers keep guessing the wrong genre, fix that before spending another afternoon moving your author name around.
