How to choose a premade cover for your book

There are hundreds of designers vying for every author’s attention with premade book covers. And let’s face it, premade covers are a great deal all around. You can get a high quality, beautiful cover, sometimes from designers who are no longer taking custom clients, at a fair price that you can afford. Not only that, but it’s also a quick turnaround so you have your cover in hand within days instead of waiting months for a custom slot. You also know exactly what you’re getting before you shell out the cash. What’s not to love?

Sometimes though, when your choices are so broad it’s hard to know if you’re making the right decision for your book. How do you know if the cover you fell in love with will actually attract your target audience? And sell your book? That’s where doing some market research will come into play along with choosing a designer who specializes in your genre, or at least works in your genre regularly.

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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.

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:

Book Cover Design: Does the author know better than the designer?

In traditional publishing, authors have zero to some say in their cover design. There’s a team of highly skilled designers who make the decisions on what the book cover will look like. If the author loves, it great! If the author hates it, well, that’s too bad because they’re designing a cover that will have the greatest potential of selling, so to them, does it matter if the author loves it? All that matters is if it sells.

However, with self-publishing authors now have a say in everything. Self-publishing authors wear so many hats – writer, editor, proofreader, promoter, designer – and even when they hire people to edit their book and design their cover, they still get the final say. It’s an amazing opportunity that the author gets to make all the decisions – but does that make them the best fit for every job?

Authors are experts at writing

You know the ins and outs of writing and how to be a storyteller. Therefore, you know your story better than anyone else – but that’s the catch. You know your story and characters so intimately, that it’s hard for you to break down your book into a simple, visual message since you’re use to focusing on details. So you may not be the best judge for your cover because you’re going to be stuck on the detail.

Book Cover Design: Simplicity is Key

Writers are great at, well, writing. No matter how talented the author’s literary skills are, most are writers and not designers. As a writer, you’re focused on details, whereas designers need to focus on a simplistic image that will capture a reader’s attention and convince them to pick up, or click on a book.

Some authors may not realize, especially new authors, that a book cover can make or break your book sales. You have roughly 3 seconds to capture a readers attention – if a cover is too detailed/busy/etc. readers are just going to scroll on by because they are looking for something interesting. When most people think of the word ‘interesting’ they think that to be interesting you have to include a variety of things, because there’s no way just one or two images can be interesting. Right?

Wrong. Look at some of the bestsellers in the past few years.

What makes an effective book cover design?

Establish a main focus for your cover

Every book has a story, and you want your cover to reflect that one idea clearly .
There should be that one element of the design that takes control of the cover and demands your focus.

Joel Friedlander has a great analogy:

“You could think of your book cover like a billboard, trying to catch the attention of browsers as they speed by. Billboards usually have 6 words or less. You have to “get it” at 60 miles per hour, in 3 to 5 seconds. “

This is exactly what needs to happen with your book cover. Readers should be able to tell at a glance:

• Your genre
• The general idea of your story
• Sense the tone of the book
• Spark an emotion (love, fear, sadness, curiosity, etc)

A romance novel will have a different tone than a mystery novel, and a nonfiction book cover should appeal to your brain instead of an emotion.

Legibility of the title

This is still a highly debated aspect of a cover design. Some professionals say that you have to be able to read the title at thumbnail size, and others say it’s not necessary. Some say it’s not necessary because Amazon (and other online retailers) displays your title right next to the thumbnail of the cover so if the reader really wants to know the title, they can read it there. However, it never hurts to make sure the title is readable at thumbnail size because when you run ads for promotions, you want people to be able to read the title.

Keep it simple

This ties back to the first point made but a busy cover can look amateurish and can actually turn readers off from wanting to look at your book. An author may see the cover as a masterpiece because the hero, his best friend, the space ship, the mountains and the dog are all represented on the cover. But not one thing stands out so all a reader sees scrolling by is a busy cover because they can’t make out what is happening or what the story is about within those 2-3 seconds. Remember, you design a cover based on grabbing your readers attention. They are the ones who are going to buy your book.

Don’t go overboard on fonts and colors

The general rule of thumb is 2-3 fonts maximum. The whole design has to work as one and this includes the font choices. Typically, the title is one font style and the author name is another. Try to steer clear of using two serif fonts or two sans-serif fonts. They typically don’t compliment each other and can make a design look amateurish.

Limiting your colors can also be beneficial, unless you have a specific (and logical) reason to use the entire rainbow. There are quite a few color palette pickers online to help you choose colors if you’re not sure where to start. Another good idea is to research what different colors represent. I am constantly referring back to the color book I own: Color – Messages & Meanings: A PANTONE Color Resource by Leatrice Eiseman. I’m sure there are other great books but I’ve found this one quite helpful.

Make sure images have a purpose

If you’re going to include an image on your cover, make sure it communicates something to the reader about your story. If the image doesn’t tell a reader something related to the main image, then maybe it’s not worth having on there.

A professional book cover designer should already know these, but the more the author and book cover designer can be on the same page, the better the cover design will be in the end.