7 Common Cover Design Mistakes

Inexperienced designers, or authors who attempt to make their own covers, tend to make these same common mistakes which make it look like an amateur design.

Trying to match all of the details perfectly

For the most part, cover designers are working with stock photography, unless you happen to find a designer who can do custom photo shoots for you. Therefore, the designer can only use what already exists. If you want a particular item/person/animal on your cover, there may be times you have to compromise the exact details in order to create an effective cover. For example if you’re putting a dog on your cover, yes you’ll want to use the same breed the dog is, but the dog might not have the same markings as what’s described in the book. Most readers aren’t going to care enough to look back at the cover to see if the dog matches the description in the book. If you’re using a silhouette of a dog, sometimes you may have to use a silhouette that looks like it could be the dog even if it happens to be a different breed.

Also keep in mind that although designers can alter images, we can’t change an angle an object is pointing, or we can’t (at least not easily) change clothing, or the position of someone’s arm or body, so using an image that’s more powerful can be more important than using something that 100% matches your story.

That said, you don’t want to be so far off that you mislead your readers, so you have to find the right balance between the truth and a cover that will sell your book.

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The Secret to a Great Cover Design

Hopefully you’ve realized that a book cover is a valuable asset to your book and can help determine the success of your book. Therefore, you decide you’d like the best cover ever. So, you start doing research and what you find are famous books by famous authors who’s covers are creative and sometimes very unique. However, these authors (or better yet publishers) can do this because their name is what is going to sell the book, not the cover. If they literally just want to put their name and title on the cover, they could and they’d still sell their book to all of their fans – but they might be missing out on potential new fans. The larger your established reader base is, the more risky designs you can try.

What self-publishing authors don’t typically realize is that the best cover might not be the most beautiful, unique, or innovative design. It’s the cover that is going to catch the attention of a target reader, communicate the genre, setting, and tone, and give them a general idea of the emotional investment they’re about to make all within 3-5 seconds. This is the first step to selling your book because if your cover is intriguing enough, they will click on your book and read the description. If your cover doesn’t convey the necessary ideas to the reader in those 3-5 seconds (aka an unprofessional cover), then it doesn’t matter if you have the most amazing book description ever written – because they’re never going to read it.

Parts of a Book

Books are traditionally organized into three main parts: front matter, the body, and the back matter. The front matter can include: the book title, publisher, copyright, table of contents, introduction, and it gives the reader an overall tone of the story. The main body is your narrative, or in nonfiction it can be your arguments, data, and other valuable information. Your back matter contains source notes, appendixes, about the author and other resourceful information. These elements should appear in specific order, unless the author has a good reason to deviate from the order.

Below is a list to get you started. Not all books will contain all of this information, and some may contain additional information not listed. This list should help you organize your book into the correct sequence. This outline follows The Chicago Manual of Style 1.4 outline with a few additions. The indication of recto (right-hand page) or verso (left-hand page) only applies to print-and-bound books since most eBooks do not have left/right pages.

Book Cover Design: How to avoid disappointment in the early stages

You’ve hired a designer, you’ve sent them what felt like a butt-load of information and the date is approaching for when you will receive the first concepts. You’re nervous, excited and your expectations are through the roof. You’ve seen the amazing covers on the designer’s website thus you’re expecting one of the concepts that they are about to send is going to be perfect and exactly what you envision. Your email dings and it’s finally here! You open it up, your heart sinks and you go, “What in the world?”

The first cover concepts are rarely perfect, unless you’ve been so precise on your wants and needs that the designer and you are so in tune you don’t have to change a thing. However, designing a cover is all about collaboration between the designer and the author, even if you’re allowing the designer to take the lead.

Here are some common things that lead to disappointment, lack of confidence along with other not very happy feelings and how to prepare for them.

Your expectations are too high

It is usually one of two scenarios:

ISBN 101 for Authors

More often than not, the authors I work with have questions about the purpose, use and how to purchase an International Book Standard Number (ISBN). I’ve found that many authors confuse the ISBN with the Bookland EAN barcode that goes on the back cover of printed books, thinking they are the same thing. They are also confused about whether they need to buy their own ISBN or if they should just use the free ISBN that some print-on-demand companies offer. If you fall into any of the these categories of confusion, I’m here to help.

About the ISBN

The ISBN became an international standard in the 1970s to solve the issue of it being difficult to locate a particular book since titles and author names can overlap. It allows each version of a published book to have its own unique identifier making it easier to track. The information associated with your ISBN includes your title, author name / publisher name, price and more.

Who needs an ISBN?

If you plan to publish and sell your book through any retail channels, you will need an ISBN.

You don’t need an ISBN if you are planning to create the book for private use only. This could include:

• Personal publications: ex) recipes, family history, photo book
• Workbooks for seminars or presentations
• Training manuals, handbooks or other material for internal use within a company
• Books or materials that are only intended as incentives or for giveaways

However, if you plan to eventually publish it for commercial use, you’ll need an ISBN at that time.

Copyright Page

There have been times where I’ve received a book to format and the author hasn’t included a copyright page. I always add in a very minimal one at that point, but it makes me wonder how many other authors just don’t include one.

Elements of a copyright page for U.S. authors

There are only two elements that are required for a copyright page.

1. The copyright statement.
   Copyright © 2015 by (Author Name)
2. All rights reserved.  Which it can be as simple as just that statement. However there is additional information that can be added like the example below.