The 7 unbreakable rules of professional book cover design

I was chatting with friends at the London Book Fair when one of them reminded me of a presentation on book cover design; which I felt duty bound to attend. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much, since I consider the cover design strategies I recommend for indie authors to be avant garde and not mainstream. But Damien Horner (@Damienhorner) delivered a 5 minute value bomb – 7 tips plus a golden rule – that was as concise as it was brilliant.

I took notes but am paraphrasing below, and I strenuously second all of these tips, especially for self-publishing authors.

What makes a good book cover?

A good book cover sells the book: it gets the right readers interested enough to find out more. I don’t mean it needs to explain your plot or win a design award. It has a much simpler job:

• Hook attention.
• Make readers curious about the book.
• Look professionally made.
• Fit the expectations and conventions of its genre.

The seven rules below explain how to do that, without cramming your entire manuscript onto the front cover.

#1 Membership

Your cover is about membership, not aesthetics. It doesn’t have to be “interesting” or “beautiful” – it needs to let people know immediately what genre it belongs in. It needs to look like one of the gang. Don’t worry about being a cliche or looking like other books in your genre. Far better to fit in and sell some books that to stand out and sell none.

#2 Lust Factor

That said, sometimes you can stand out with a really freaking beautiful book cover, but these are usually for literary fiction books with mainstream publishing and a big promotion budget; they need to be designed well, and a little artsy, to appeal to the people they are supposed to appeal to. For most popular genre fiction, indie authors attempting to go this route will fail, because it’s really difficult to create a cover so beautiful people want to lick it, unless you’ve been designing book covers for years (and even then!) If this is your very first book cover and you’re designing yourself, or hiring someone cheap, it’s doubtful you’ll come up with a lustful cover.

#3 The Blink Test

Whether you go with basic genre conventions or attempt the trickier “lust factor” cover, your book cover needs to tell people what it’s about in one second. Flash the cover in front of someone quickly. Can they make out the art? Does it communicate the genre immediately? The book cover isn’t the place to “explain” all the details – people aren’t going to read all the text on the cover unless they are already hooked by the cover alone in under one second. It has to appeal, attract and communicate the basics (genre, maybe setting) and as I like to say, have an immediate emotional impact (as Wordsworth says, “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”).

#4 The Title is Integral

You need to have a great title and be sure about it before you start the cover design, because book covers have to compensate. If you pick a simple, abstract, one word title that doesn’t say anything about the type of book or story, the cover art has to do all the work. On the other hand, if you have a very long, keyword rich, descriptive title, the cover art can do less work.

#5 Straplines (taglines, subtitles…)

Damien says publishers rely on straplines to explain a crappy title. If you had a great title with great cover art, you wouldn’t need a tagline to add more information (and people are unlikely to read the small cover text on your book cover anyway…)

If you do a brilliant job, you don’t need them. However, almost all the indie authors I know are doing a firmly mediocre job, with not-great book covers and abstract titles that don’t mean anything – and then they also don’t add any small text. Which means – the covers aren’t passing the blink test, at all. In my opinion, almost all self-published books would benefit from putting a strapline, subtitle or at least blurb on the cover that gives more information.

If it’s a werewolf romance, you need either:

1. A werewolf on the cover, preferably with another boy/girl to show “romance”

2. “Werewolf” in the title.

3. A subtitle or strapline that mentions werewolves, lichen, or hints at romance somehow

4. At the very least, even though it’s cheesy and obvious, put “a werewolf romance” and use that as the subtitle as well on Amazon. It’s heavy-handed, and unprofessional, but it will help you sell more books than every other self-publishing author who doesn’t use any keywords and has covers that don’t convey the genre.

#6 Consider your distribution platform

If Amazon/ ebook retailers are your primary sales platform (and they are, unless you are a professional speaker or planning to sell thousands of copies at events) you need to design for Amazon. Most indie authors already know this and recycle the (in my opinion) bad advice that you need the text to be legible as a thumbnail.

It isn’t true. Your cover has to stand out and be impactful even as a thumbnail, yes – but people don’t read text on thumbnails! They read the text on the side of the thumbnail, or if the cover is great, they click the image to find out more. Damien used the example of one of Seth Godin’s covers, which just have big, fun art and no text at all.

Really big text has its place (thrillers, horror) but some genres don’t call for it, and big text may ruin the emotional promise your cover needs to be making. Big text is just like all caps, shouting at the world, LOOK AT MY BOOK, DAMN YOU!

#7 Hierarchy

You can’t stress everything all at once, and you need to decide what’s most important.

If you are a first time author with no platform, it’s probably not your name –  because nobody knows who you are. So the title is almost always most important – it will be roughly 100% and fill the width of the cover.

Then, probably is your author name, which can be at about 50%. Don’t make the mistake of thinking because you aren’t famous, your author name should be tiny and invisible. Make your author name roughly the same size as other authors in your genre. People don’t know you aren’t famous. You can even make your name HUGE and people may assume you are famous, even if they’ve never heard of you (but it can backfire, so don’t use that as  strategy).

On the other hand, if you are famous, the title doesn’t matter so much, because you already have millions of fans who will buy anything you write – so the name would be 100%, and first, and the title would be smaller and down below.

You may have a series title as well, plus a book title, plus a tagline and your author name – some elements should be really small (12 pt font, but stretched out widely at 600 spacing) which will look more professional than trying to make the small text as big as you can and cramming it in – something you might do if you believe the mistaken advice “make the text legible as a thumbnail” and make all the text as big as possible, fighting for attention.

The GOLDEN RULE of book cover design

I’ve said this in hundreds of ways, but never quite as well as Damien phrased it:

Be clear before you are clever.

Indie authors often want to stand out and do something creative. They want to refer to or symbolize the contents of the book – a book people haven’t read yet! Readers won’t get what you’re referring to or symbolizing. Don’t be clever. People aren’t going to reflect on your cover and try and figure out what it means, and analyze while they read the story.

The cover is packaging. It’s a billboard. It catches the eye and attracts people to read the summary and reviews. That’s it. It’s great if it can also truthfully represent the book, but it’s always better to use a powerful cover that doesn’t quite represent the book accurately, but doubles your sales, than it is to represent the book accurately (a mistake most authors make) with a shitty cover crammed full of exact details and pictures and scenes and meanings that you can explain and talk about for an hour but nobody else gets (or even likes).

Make a beautiful cover that sells the book.

Selling the book is the cover’s only job.

Don’t get caught up in all the other stuff that doesn’t matter.

The best cover is the cover that sells the most books (unless you’re writing literary fiction or you have a career goal that doesn’t depend on book sales).

How to design a book cover with these rules, step by step

Here’s how I’d put the rules above to work on an actual cover.

Step 1: Study your genre

Start with the Amazon bestseller lists in your specific category, before you get attached to a cover idea. Look at the fonts, colors and images, and notice the 3 or 4 things the covers share. I want you to figure out what readers already recognize, because “this looks like the books I love” is a pretty good first impression.

Step 2: Settle the title first

Your title is part of the design, so decide on it before arranging everything around a title you might throw away. If it’s abstract, the image needs to explain more about the genre. If it’s long and descriptive, the art can do less work. I wouldn’t make both mysterious and expect readers to solve the puzzle.

Step 3: Choose one strong image

Pick an image that communicates the right feeling immediately, instead of collecting objects that represent everything in your story. My three cover layouts that work give you somewhere to start: one strong picture, a character in front of a scene, or a close-up face. If you don’t have an image, try my free AI cover maker to generate a cover from your title, author name and genre.

Step 4: Pick fonts that belong

Go back to the bestsellers and look at the lettering, not just the pictures. My book cover fonts by genre post can help you find a direction that fits. A font you personally love can still send completely the wrong message, and adding a heavy dropshadow or bevel isn’t going to fix that.

Step 5: Set the hierarchy

Give the title roughly the full width of the cover, with your author name about half that size, then compare the balance with other books in your genre. These are starting proportions, not an excuse to make everything enormous. I’d keep supporting text small and space it out, so it looks deliberate instead of squeezed into whatever room is left.

Step 6: Add a strapline if needed

If the title and image still don’t communicate the genre, add a strapline or subtitle that helps. This isn’t where I’d put another mysterious reference that only makes sense after chapter twelve. For a werewolf romance, even “a werewolf romance” gives readers something useful, which is more than you can say for a clever line nobody understands.

Step 7: Run the blink test

Shrink your cover to thumbnail size and put it next to the bestsellers you studied. Does it belong, and does the image still have an emotional impact? Show it to someone for one second and ask what kind of book they think it is. You can also upload a JPG to my book cover critique tool for AI feedback on design, marketability and genre clarity.

Step 8: Give yourself a starting point

You don’t have to build everything yourself: my six free Word cover templates and seven short video lessons give you a starting point plus help with genre, images and fonts. Or open a template in Cover Creator and change the title, fonts and image in your browser; nonfiction authors can also use my pack of 100+ nonfiction book cover templates.

If you already have a cover that isn’t working, my cover redesign tool can make a new version from a rough mockup, premade cover or sketch. For the longer explanation, read my free PDF, Cover Design Secrets that Sell More Books.

Need a book cover designer?

Our custom-made templates are a quick and easy solution, but if you want top-quality for your book and are ready to hire help – I guarantee my cover designers will do it right.