How Your Book Cover Design Could Be Sabotaging Your Sales

You’ve finished your book, made a cover, and put it next to the other books in your genre. Somehow yours looks homemade.

A professional cover needs to look like it belongs in its genre, with good images and typography that supports the design.

It also needs to attract the right reader as a small image; making every word readable at thumbnail size isn’t the goal.

What are the best practices for designing a professional book cover that attracts readers and increases sales?

Start with the books your readers already buy. Look at their covers together, rather than picking one you happen to like. Notice how much space the title takes up, what kind of images they use, and how much detail they leave out.

Then put your cover beside them.

Does it belong there? Or have you made something completely different because you wanted to stand out?

That’s usually where things go wrong. Authors want a cover that represents their particular story, with all the details that make it special; readers haven’t read the story yet, so the meaningful object in the corner means nothing to them (and neither does the mysterious symbol you’ve spent the afternoon trying to fit behind the title).

Say you write cozy mysteries. Your cover needs to appeal to people looking for cozy mysteries. If it looks like a grim thriller, you’re making the wrong promise, even if every object on it appears somewhere in the book.

The cover is packaging. Being accurate about the furniture isn’t much help if nobody wants to read the book.

The point is to sell the book. A simple image with the right text can do that job better than a complicated scene. These three book cover layouts give you somewhere useful to start.

What are the key design principles and best practices for creating an effective book cover?

Once the genre is clear, look at how the pieces fit together. You can have great cover art and still screw it up with the text.

These are the things that tend to make a cover look amateurish:

• Fonts that don’t suit the genre.
• Blurry or low-resolution images, especially when everything else is sharp.
• Characters that look pasted onto the background.
• Too many colors competing for attention.
• A title squeezed around the art because there wasn’t room left for it.
• Every piece of text made equally big and important.
• Tiny details added to explain the story, which just make the cover busier.

Adding more stuff won’t fix a cover that looks like crap.

Try removing something first. If the image is strong, let it do its job. You don’t need to fill every empty space with a character, a quote or another decorative flourish.

Give the text somewhere to go

Your title is part of the design. Choose the art with the text in mind, instead of finishing a complicated image and then wondering where to put the words.

The title will usually get the most attention. Your author name should still look deliberate and professional, rather than being tucked into a corner in tiny letters because nobody knows who you are yet. Compare its size with other author names in your genre.

Smaller text can stay small.

If the series name, subtitle and author name all shout as loudly as the title, nothing gets your attention. Give the eye somewhere to land, then let the less important stuff support it.

Fonts matter here, too. A font can be perfectly readable and still feel wrong for the book. Check these book cover fonts by genre before settling for whatever was at the top of the menu.

Check the thumbnail without making everything huge

The advice to make all your cover text readable as a thumbnail is kind of BS. Readers can read the title beside the image. What they need from the cover is an immediate sense of the genre and mood.

Big text works for some books. It can also ruin a cover that needs to feel quiet or literary. Don’t enlarge everything until it technically passes the thumbnail test but looks ridiculous when someone opens the full image.

Shrink the cover down and look at the whole thing. Does it still have an impact? Can you make out the main image? Then look at it full size and check that the text isn’t crowded or awkward. There’s more on this in my seven rules of professional book cover design.

Make the next book look related

If these books belong to a series, their covers should look like they belong together. Keep the typography and general layout consistent enough that readers can recognize the connection. You can change the image without starting the whole design over.

Make the series number easy to find, too. Readers shouldn’t have to guess which book comes next.

Before changing a whole series, put the covers side by side. Fix the shared layout first, then carry those changes across so you don’t have to solve the same font problem on every book.