What font should you use on your book cover design? Check this awesome list of best fonts per genre!

Using the right fonts on your book cover helps tell the reader what genre your book fits into and elicits an emotional response.

You want it to look great, but also be appropriate, fit in well with the cover design, and (probably) be just a little more interesting than a standard font.

So I’ve put together some cheat-sheets of the best fonts to use for your book cover, divided by genre.

In general, stick to 1 “fancy” or decorative font, and keep the other fonts very simple. You don’t want them to compete.

Also – the MOST important thing about your book cover (for fiction at least) is the picture – so don’t distract or cover it up with the text. Let the picture do its work, make the text more subtle, by blending in with the image as one art piece.

For non-fiction, the most important thing is the text, mostly the subtitle. Use simple serif or sans-serif fonts.

To use these: find the font you like and Google it. (The name of each font is written in that font).

Some are free, some aren’t.

If you’d rather not hunt for fonts at all, the AI book cover maker picks a genre-appropriate font and puts your title on the art for you; you can still swap the font afterwards.

There are LOTS more, but this is a good start. Once the title is on the cover, make a free 3D book mockup of it: a font that looks fine flat often looks thin and weak on an actual book.

Fonts are one piece of the cover. For the image, the hierarchy and the blink test, see the 7 unbreakable rules of professional book cover design.

Best fonts for book cover design

Check out this updated list of best fonts for fantasy and scifi!

Here’s another big list of free fonts.

To try a few on a real cover, open one of my templates in the free online cover editor and type your title in; it has most of these fonts built in.

Fonts are one signal. The images, colors and layouts readers expect are in book cover design by genre.