Your cover is your book’s first impression on your potential readers!
After your manuscript has been copy edited, even while you’re having the interior typeset, is a great time to start your cover design.
Hiring a Pro
Hiring a professional cover designer to create a custom cover for you is usually the best route to take, if you can afford it.
Professional cover design pricing varies based on quality, style, level of detail, and the experience of the pro. Anywhere from a $100 (simple, text-only, amateur / hobbyist designer) up to several thousand dollars (high-definition, custom illustration by a seasoned professional).
Pre-Made Covers
A slightly more affordable (and faster) option is pre-made covers. They most often cost less than a thousand dollars, some as low as a hundred. These are covers that have already been set up by a professional designer. You pick one you like, pay for it, and then the artist will put your title and name on the file.
Since most of the work has already been done, you can save quite a bit of time and money this way.
The downsides of using pre-made covers include a lack of customization and a lack of exclusivity.
A cover designed alongside you by a professional will be meant to match your book’s content more precisely. Whereas, a pre-made cover will often be relatively generic, so it might not represent your book as strongly.
Pre-made cover designs are also often resold. Meaning that you and 100 other authors may be using the exact same cover design. This can bring up questions for the reader as to who copied who and why anyone was being copied at all. And, if the shopper didn’t like another book that used the same design, they may be biased against purchasing your book, even if they might actually enjoy the content.
I wouldn’t say that these occurrences take place every minute of every day, but I want you to understand the kind of annoyances that may come with the territory of using pre-made covers.
DIY Covers
The cheapest of all options is to make the cover yourself. This can be done for free or the cost of access to software like Adobe Photoshop.
You can do this pretty easily using an app like Adobe Express or Canva. I recommend these simple sites for new authors because they are so easy to use, often allowing you to create a decent cover in less than ten minutes. Though not as powerful as products like Photoshop or Illustrator, these free apps offer many book cover templates to help you get started with their drag-and-drop interfaces.
Strategies for DIY Book Covers
Whatever Your Want
If you have a particular design in mind for your book cover, you cna create just do that. The vulnerability is that it may not fit your genre and / or appeal to your market, leading to near invisibility once it’s on the market unless you already have an army of readers salivating over your next release (i.e., who couldn’t care less what your cover looks like because they want more of your content however they can get it).
Use a Template
There are templates for book covers all over the web. You could pick a template cover that suits your genre and then change the title and name and be done with it.
However, I’d recommend that you take some time to customize the template a little. Believe it or not, many new authors have the idea to just add their title and name to a template. So, instead of being the 10th book on the market with the same cover design, take time to make small adjustments. Examples:
- Choose a different typeface (change Playfair Display to Trocchi or Alegreya to Montserrat Classic).
- Change the font (from 20 to 50 or 35 to 90).
- Alter the graphics (desaturating the image, brightening it, changing the tint, etc.).
- Swap out background photos (change the picture of a bloody knife to a muddy footprint or an eerie forest).
Do Cover Research
This is something I’ve always done for my cover design clients. It’s pretty simple, but it makes sure that they get design options that fit with their target market, even as I take steps to help the cover stand out a bit.
The first step in the research is to look up the top 10 (at least) best sellers in a particular genre. This is easy enough to do on Amazon.
For each of these covers, take note of what elements come together to make the cover. This includes the typeface, font size, text color, images (illustration or photo, if any), text placement, and color scheme.
There will likely be a trend among the best seller covers that you see. You can then use those patterns as a guideline for creating your own cover.
For example, if you noticed that your niche’s top sellers use sans serif typeface, pink text, and feature photographs of women’s barely covered breasts, you know these are elements you would want to incorporate into your cover. Make small adjustments for the sake of customization. If your book features Martian women, you might tint the cover model’s skin green or add a tail, extra belly button, or remove one breast. You would still create a cover that “looks like it belongs,” but you would add things that reflect your specific content.
And that’s it! Your cover is designed and ready to upload to whichever publishing platforms you’ll be selling on, including your own website.
When saving your work, be sure to download your cover as a .jpg file (lower definition, smaller file size, often loads faster) and a .png file (higher-definition, looks great when people zoom in on the image, larger file size). You’ll need to use one or the other in different circumstances. For instance, Amazon requires a .jpg file, while you may want to use the higher-definition .png file on your website or social media pages.
With your designed cover in hand, it’s time to move on to prepping your advertising!