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So many books are published each year—a good book design must communicate that the pages within are worth a reader’s time and attention. An author at a bookstore is bound to be impressed by the amount of creative energy in all of the book covers and overwhelmed as to how her own is going to stand out. Easily visualize numbers and data with Visme's charts, graphs and data widgets.
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However, your book cover is your number one marketing tool. If you are not a confident designer and create a subpar book cover design, your book sales will suffer. Your book’s cover design will tell potential readers if your book is professionally made and worth their time. A few years ago, Martin Lake’s book sales were dismal. As a first-time self-published author, he was selling just 15 books a month.
How a book cover design contest works
If you check out the books on your shelves, you’ll probably notice that there aren’t more than two or three fonts at play. Between the title, the author’s name, and any other text you want to include on the cover, you can find a way to make two fonts stretch. One of the great things about book covers is that there is almost no graphic style that can’t work.
Design eBook Covers and Printable Book Covers With Ease
Tor Books Criticized for Use of AI-Generated Art in 'Gothikana' Cover Design - Publishers Weekly
Tor Books Criticized for Use of AI-Generated Art in 'Gothikana' Cover Design.
Posted: Wed, 21 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]
Though there may not be as many designs and styles to choose from, that can make the customization process less daunting. Regardless, these photo books still make a superb present that can cost under $10 without compromising on sentimentality. We've designed well over 10,000 book covers for traditional publishers and multiple bestselling authors across all genres. The clearer you are in communicating your needs, the better the chances that our designers will respond. For more tips on how to write an effective cover design brief, check out this post! However, keep in mind that your design brief is only a starting point.
The hallmark of great design is simplicity, so resist the urge to pack your book cover design with too many elements. The goal is to provide your reader with only what they need to know to be intrigued to pick up your book and learn more. Translating your vision into a tangible draft, seeking valuable feedback, and iterating based on insights helps fine-tune your design to perfection. Testing the final design among your target audience ensures it resonates effectively, offering the opportunity for further adjustments. Finally, integrating your book cover seamlessly into your publishing journey and promotional materials is the key to unlocking the door to a vast readership.
Color Palette
When you’re uploading eBooks to various marketplaces, most allow you to use a simple JPEG as your book cover. Don’t forget to check the small version of your final book cover. You can ask family, coworkers, and friends on social media which cover they prefer between a few different designs. But I would recommend asking your local librarian or bookstore clerk, too. If you use an image for your cover art, check the attribution guidelines to see if there are specific locations (such as the back cover or title page) where artist credit should be given. But if you have the budget, a detailed illustration can really set the tone for your book.
The printer will want this as one wide file that they can print and either cut or fold to fit the final book. Most printers prefer high-quality PDFs but others take .ai or .eps. Think of the cover or front of the dust jacket as an extension of the marketing plan for the book.
Ensuring Your Book Cover Design Meets Printing and Digital Standards
It’s a time to explore various possibilities and iterate through different design choices. Visually, we wanted a dynamic treatment of the text that could provide expressiveness to the composition and enhance the “light science fiction” component of the novel. So, we used a condensed and thick typeface to form a solid typographic mass, and then we skewed it, adapting it to the forms and counterforms of the base illustration.
As the audiobook market continues to grow, you might want to create one yourself, which requires a different cover design format. Most print services will usually offer templates to help you get your proportions right. KDP, for example, has a cover calculator and template generator that will turn out a PDF that you can import into your image editing software and lay over your design. Remember that in print-on-demand services (and in any printing company in general), perfection is difficult to achieve.
If your book cover design doesn’t follow the guidelines I’ve outlined above, your book — no matter how well written — will fail. If you’re an author of a book series, choose some element of your book covers to keep the same. This cohesive design can be a theme, image, or font to strengthen your branding as an author. If you don’t have design experience, I recommend spending the money to hire a cover design artist. It can cost a pretty penny, but your book cover is your #1 marketing tool, so you don’t want to mess it up.
These options add high-value to your design but also increase the cost of each book. Download the finished book cover as a high resolution image or a PDF with bleed marks for printing. Upload any visual elements like the font pairings, icons or images that you need, or browse through all of our options in the left sidebar. Elizabeth Berry (she/her) is the Updates Editor at the Good Housekeeping Institute where she optimizes lifestyle content across verticals. Prior to this role, she was an Editorial Assistant for Woman’s Day where she covered everything from gift guides to recipes.
The woven flowers with the elegant san serif type is so pleasing to the eye. Love the rich but muted colors and the thorns on the stems. Love the rich pink and chartreuse green, the zany arrangement of type and artwork, and the wonderful illustration. This title has a lot of text and Linda Huang did such a great job with it! I’m a sucker for perspective type and dimensional design; this is probably my favorite. Love the shapes, the texture and the off-register colors.
When a cover is so beautifully thought through it makes me very happy. Atmospheric and very arts and crafts—right up my street (yep, cover design is so subjective). There’s quite a lot going on but the balance is great. I love the handmade quality of the illustration and type, it makes the cover feel very intimate, which is perfect for the material. A perfect expression of an instagram post rendered as book cover, and I love the addition of the water droplets that give it that extra dimension.
Your reader should know whether your book is funny, romantic, tragic, or scary with one glance at the cover. Mood is usually communicated through your choice of fonts, colours, and imagery, so each element you use to build your design has to support the overall mood of your book. Furthermore, design digital ads for online promotion, employing the book cover as the central visual.
Every element is so precise, but still human, warm, with ephemera beautifully evocative of a time and place. I don’t even know what to say, everything about this is perfect. The book itself is physically small, light in your hand; with Lauren’s design, it becomes monumental. The power of the figure looking out at the world through that O is memoir perfection.
Start with your own judgement and then move to the author. From there, let outsiders sample the cover free of context. If the cover features a child, they might ask, “Is the narrator of this novel a child? ” They might point out that a design strikes them as funny or heartbreaking. “Up-market” titles are books that are well-written while also retaining the readability and accessibility of genre.
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