How To Make A Selfpub Book Cover That Looks Like It Came From An NYC Marketing Department Part 1

So, I started thinking about this post when I went to a couple of book-focused SF cons. And for obvious reasons related to the current publishing market, a lot of the panelists and a lot of the dealer tables had self-published books or books from very very small publishers. And that is fine! There is nothing whatsoever wrong with that, if that's something that works for a writer's goals.

But then I was in yet another 'how to sell your stuff' panel (I went to all of them) where an author proudly held up her book and said, "The most important thing with a cover is that it looks professional, and that might mean you have to pay for it. I paid my cover designer a lot, but it was absolutely worth it, look at how professional my cover is!"

And in the back of the room, I was thinking, for the nth time that weekend, lady, I'm glad you're happy, but everything about that cover reeks of "self published".

It was a fairly attractive cover! The art had been done by somebody who grokked art! But not by somebody who grokked what pro-published book covers look like.

Now, I don't work in pro-publishing or graphic design (although I do some work for a very small indy publisher/art studio that sometimes does graphic design) but I work at a library and spend at least five hours a day with books passing through my hands. And then on my days off I go to cons or used book sales and look at more books. And I've reached the point where about 95% of the time, I can look at a self-pub or small-publisher book and immediately tag it as not from a pro publisher. (The other 5% of the time, it's either a self-published book by someone who really knows design, or it's from one of those small imprints of a pro house that is deliberately trying to look art-house.)

So I started thinking seriously about what it was, that je ne se quois that I could see and the people on the con panels clearly couldn't, and then testing those theories against my knowledge of design and the book covers I stare at all day every day, and here's what I came up with.

Now, I'm not saying that 'looking pro' should be your primary goal - what do I know about selfpub markets; I suspect in some of them looking pro doesn't help (niche kindle erotica, say). I also make no promises that looking pro will help you sell; it's what the marketing departments of the big publishing houses think will sell, but are they right? I can't say. Also, even within the large publishers, some genres are more flexible with these principles than others (especially on mass-market paperbacks.) But most of these principles are pretty basic to design, and are worth thinking about even if you aren't going for that particular look. And they all pretty much come down to one thing:

The only purpose of the cover is to get people to read the title of the book

That's it. That's the whole secret. Anything that makes it harder for people to read your title should not be part of the design; anything that makes it more likely for people to read your title is good.

(There are a few exceptions to this, i.e. if you're already so famous that the author name is more important than the title, or if you're part of a bestselling series or franchise and selling the brand is more important than selling the individual book, or if you're just so good that you can break the rules and get away with it, etc., but if any of those things apply, then you already have a pro marketing department working for you, and are not reading this post. And most of these things still apply anyway, they just apply to the author or franchise name or whatever instead of the title.)

Let's design an example. I'm assuming for the purpose of this post that you know the basics - how to open a file in a graphics program and put text on it, basically - but not really much else. I'll use my current silly fic WIP for the example just because it's got a title that's shaped well for playing with design and a theme that makes it easy to find public-domain art to work with. The WIP itself is ridiculous AU slash but it's an American politics AU so my marketing department has decided, for the purposes of this post, to market it as a novel about the vicissitudes of American politics. Got that?

OK, here are our two proposed covers. Which one looks more professional?

If you said "A", you have the same eye for covers that I do.

A is literally just black Times New Roman on an off-white background. It did not take an expensive art consultant, it took an open-source graphics editor and maybe two minutes to do, including looking up the correct proportions for a standard hardcover.

I expect one of the reasons so many people end up with really amateur-looking covers is that the art is what has taken all the time and effort and money, and it requires the magic that most people don't understand. Even if it's just paging though public-domain photos until you find one that feels perfect for your story (like I did on the second cover) it feels like that's most of the effort, so they let the art control the design, when it should be the text in control. Or, if they're going for minimalist art, they then decide they need to focus on the design to make it distinctive, and they let fancy design tricks detract from the title itself.

Now, I'm not saying you should always go for plain black text on white if you want to look professional, but I'm saying that you should always remember that the title being read is the most important purpose of the cover. If at any point you're making a choice about the cover, fall back on that: does it make it more likely that people will read the title? If yes, do it. If no, don't do it. And if your choice is cover A or B, then yes. Choose boring A.

I'm going to break it down a little more, but really, it all comes back to that idea.

The first set of principles are about the text itself.

1. MAKE IT BIG.

For most books I see on our shelves, the title (or the author on author-centered covers) takes up somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of the total vertical space of the cover. Sometimes a lot more. If it's less than 1/8, chances are pretty good it's selfpub.

Presumably, the idea here is that your prospective reader should be able to read the title when they are still halfway across the store, or peering at you from the back of a panel room, or looking at a tiny thumbnail on their Kindle. Make it big. Make sure people can read it without needing to work for it. I don't care if that leaves less room for the art; the art is not important. Getting people to read the title is. If it can't be easily read from at least 20 feet away, make it bigger.

Here's our samples again, version 2:

All I changed was making the title text on B a LOT bigger, but it's already looking a lot more like a pro cover. Except in order to make the larger text stand out over the image, I also had to fade out the image some. That's okay, because, as you are probably tired of me saying already: the TEXT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE IMAGE. A lot of covers with text that's too small are doing it to squeeze it in around an image: never do that. If you have to make something less prominent, always pick the image.

Maybe more importantly than looking more pro, it's also a lot more readable. That's a cover I will be able to read from the back of the panel room or while browsing on my phone. I don't know why it's a constant struggle to convince people (on all kinds of marketing stuff) to MAKE THE DAMN WORDS BIG ENOUGH TO READ, but the struggle is real. Just make them big. It's easy once you try.

2. Center the title horizontally.

Okay, so this is less universal than MAKE IT BIG: a lot of mid-20th-century covers, especially, don't center the text. But in current trends (that is, this millennium), the vast majority of pro book covers center the title. It's another thing that's really easy to do, and makes a big difference. Just press that "justify: center" button and done.

Yeah, it probably means your text is now over the central part of your image. But that's fine, because the central part of your image should be the title. Centering is a shortcut way of ensuring that your text is also the metaphorical center of the design. You won't be tempted to try to fit the text around the image, you won't be able to use an image that's going to steal the spotlight from the text, you won't accidentally arrange the text to draw a person's eye to somebody's else book that's on display beside yours.

Vertical placement allows for a little more flexibility; you can place the title vertically really anywhere you want, as long as you pull it a little bit away from the top and bottom margins. You want to keep the reader's focus on the cover itself, not tempt them to drift away from it up or down, and margins are in general good. At least an inch, inch and a half top-bottom margin on the title is good on a hardcover/trade-sized book. Your horizontal margins can be a lot smaller: you want the text BIG.

Let's see our samples again:

The only change is centering the text better. B still has issues but it's already looking a lot more like something you'd see on a store bestseller display.

3. Colors for clarity

Color is important, and getting the wrong color combination can really screw up your cover - both its readability, and its whole look.

(I confess I had to go in and make the color choice on the original cover B worse several times, because I couldn't make myself make it bad enough, but I really have seen actual self-pub covers that bad. Lots of them.)

I can't do a whole course in color theory, mostly because I don't know enough, but for the purposes of designing a professional book cover, you're pretty safe sticking to a variation of the same rules that were used for medieval heraldry. If the only thing that's keeping you from getting a sword in the chest from a friendly is your shield being readable in the middle of a melee, you'll figure out readable colors really fast. (Also, these do seem to be more or less the rules the pro designers are using.)

Classical heraldry divides "tinctures" into two categories: colors and metals.

For our purposes, metals are black, white, silver and gold. Everything else is a color.

The basic rule is that colors can only go on top of metals, and only metals can go on top of colors. So if your background is a color, your text had better be black, white, silver, or gold. If your text is a color, your background had better be black, white, silver, or gold.

If you aren't using metallic inks, you can sometimes get away with grays for silver and yellows for gold, but it had better be a proper golden yellow, not a mustard or lemon, and you have to be very careful about clashing. If your background behind the text is an image or pattern, you should treat it as a color, unless it's entirely very very dark or very very pale or grayscale.

Classical heraldry also bans metal on metal, but black on white or gold on black or even gold on white is okay for bookcovers, as long as the contrast is high and the text is very visible.

Which is the other main thing to keep in mind: your title should still be equally readable if you change the whole cover to grayscale. If you're depending for contrast on differing colors rather than a contrast of dark/light, it won't be readable enough. So if your background is dark, the title needs to be light, and vice-versa; if the background is in between, the title needs to be either very dark or very light.

The final thing: if you find yourself messing with outlines or dropshadows or gradients or whatever in order to give the title enough contrast against the background/image, stop. If you're doing that, it means the background/image is too prominent. You need to change the background, not the text. (Which doesn't mean you can never do those kind of text effects, especially if the design is otherwise very spare - although I recommend doing them very sparingly - but you should never depend on them to make your text readable. Ever. If you can't make the text readable enough without that kind of stuff, change the background.)

So let's mess with the samples again. The background on B has a lot of color, so we're definitely going with either black or white for the text. It also has a lot of dark/light contrast, so we're probably going to have to mess with that some more, too: darken it if we go with white, lighten it even more if we go with black. (If you have no idea how to darken or lighten but want to try, there are tutorials for that, I may even write a very basic one someday. The method I used here isn't really the best, but it's the hardest to screw up completely.)

I like the way the cover looks with white text, but I can't darken the image enough to make the white stand out against the stripes on the flag without it going way too muddy, so because we're not talking about choosing images in this part, I went with black text, and lightened the image instead. Still looks a whole lot better than it did! And lightening the image draws the eye even more to the text.

Since I liked the white-on-dark look on Cover B, I decided to try it on Cover A, to make it a tiny bit less boring - it's metal-on-color and high contrast so it's still looking pretty good.

4. Your Font Should Be Invisible

Not literally invisible, obviously, you want people to read the title. But if people notice the font before they read the words, you have screwed up.

There are two main ways people screw up here: the first is using a font that will already have strong associations in people's minds. That means no Comic Sans, no Papyrus, no Mistral, none of the default fonts that people have been using for school powerpoints and signs on the breakroom fridge since Windows 3.1. I know it's hard, but even if they're perfect for your story, don't use them. People will look at them and think of 'if you sprinkle when you tinkle' or homemade birthday cards from their aunt instead of 'I should read this story'.

That doesn't mean you can't use the default Windows or Apple fonts, but if you use them, they have to be default. You can get away with something like Times New Roman that is so boring and ubiquitous that nobody even notices it's a font. The farther you get from a standard serif, though, the more important it is to not use a font that people will associate with things other than books.

Also, never use a distinctive font that's closely associated with a particular brand unless your book is actually for that brand. If you use the ST:TNG font, or even a font that is really similar to the ST:TNG font, you had better be writing a ST:TNG tie-in. Otherwise you will confuse people and also look like someone who is scared to establish their own brand.

The second way people screw up is using a font that's so fancy it makes the text hard to read. If people look at your title and the first thing they notice is the curly-cue font or that it looks futuristic or whatever, that's bad. The first thing they notice should be what your title is. The minute your font choice is distracting from actually reading the words, you need to pick a more boring font. And if the font is actively making the words illegible from a distance, you definitely need to pick a different font.

That doesn't mean you have to use a really boring font (although the majority of pro-published covers do). You can certainly use a font that adds a little bit of interest, especially if the rest of your design is going to be very simple, or if it helps clarify the genre/style of the book, or create unity across a brand, or whatever. But it needs to be clear to read, not have the wrong kind of associations, and not distract at all from the words themselves. If you're not sure, go simpler. And you can use a font that's similar to one that's overexposed the wrong way, just not too similar.

There are fads among pro designers where certain font families will get a lot of use on book covers for awhile, and using those fonts can help. I've seen a lot of year-end lists of those kinds of fonts going around in previous years, although most of the fonts on them are not free. Just going to a font library website and using a free-but-not-Windows-default one can make a big difference in how professional a design looks, though.

The final rule of fonts is that you can never use more than two fonts in the same design. Ever. And at most one of them can be a fancy/trick font. You can get away with using a fancy font for your large text (as long as it's readable and not distracting) and a boring one for your small text, but it's a really super bad idea to go beyond that. More that three fonts (including italics or dropcaps!) in a single design and it's really obvious you don't know what you're doing, and it also makes your design look like an un-unified confusing mess.

Sticking with one font is the safest, as long as it's legible at the text sizes you need.

So, sample cover time again! The font on cover B is actually not too egregious - it's legible, it's not so fancy it's distracting, it's not Comic Sans - but it is one of the old default Windows fonts, which is enough that it looks amateurish to me. So I've switched it off to another one, which was also pre-loaded on my work computer, but it's one that I at least don't have a lot of associations with, and it works pretty well with the theme of the story - sort of formal, sort of comical.

Cover A gets to stay Times New Roman. It's not a brilliant design choice but it is basically invisible so it's fine. Obsessing over finding the perfect font for a cover is not a great use of time; as long as you avoid the pitfalls above, or you stick with something basic and boring, you'll be fine.

5. Manually Adjust Spacing and Kerning

This is something that most people don't even know to think about, but customizing the spacing puts the final polish on your text that takes it from amateur to really professional looking. Not just the spacing between lines and words, but between individual letters in the text- that's what kerning is.

Kerning could be a class on its own, and it's a class I haven't taken. But the basics are: in hand-lettering, or in hand-set letterpress type, the spacing between individual letters is adjusted on the fly to compensate for the different shapes of the letters. Your standard computer fonts aren't that smart. If you look at the current version of the sample covers, you should be able to tell that the r and y in "Primary" look like they're squished really close together, whereas the F and a in "Failure" look like they're spaced very far apart. Most people wouldn't notice that unless they were looking for it, but on something like a cover design, it subconsciously gives the impression of a design that's not as polished.

Most graphics or design software has a setting for manual kerning adjust, although it may take some effort to find it if you haven't used it before. As to how to adjust the kerning, I'm sure there's all sorts of stuff you could learn, but I usually just tweak it two letters at a time until it looks like all the letters are more-or-less evenly spaced. Usually I end up condensing it so overall the letters are closer together, but that's just my style; you can expand it instead if that works better for your design. Just make it match. Once you've done that, you may need some other minor adjustments in sizing and positioning.

You don't need to bother with a letter-by-letter kerning tweak on smaller text (like byline), but if you have overall expanded or condensed your large text, you might want to adjust your small text to match it better.

A manual kerning adjust can also make all the difference between a font that might look a little bit too amateur and one that looks polished and pro.

Once you've adjusted the kerning, adjust the line spacing if you have multiple lines of title. Default line spacing is designed for paragraphs of small text, like what you're reading now, and is usually fairly widely spaced. For large design elements, it's usually too much, and you'll probably want to reduce it. (Do this after you've adjusted the kerning, because the kerning will change where ascenders and descenders are relative to each other.) You might decide you want to keep the wide spacing, but even then it's worth it to adjust it a little from the default, just for that final polish.

Don't space things too widely or too close, though. Readability is still the key. Spacing should not distract from reading the title.

Here's the manually kerned and spaced versions of the sample covers; the changes are fairly subtle, and I should probably tweak it a little more, but you should be able to tell that this version looks generally neater than the previous one.

Bonus Level: The other cover text

You will have a "By author" line on your cover. Most, but not all, books from major publishers will also have some other kind of small text on the cover: a blurb, a subtitle, a series name, a tagline. Not having small text doesn't necessarily scream selfpub, but it doesn't help.

The author text can be fairly large, but should not distract from the title. (If you're a millionaire bestseller, then this does not apply, but you are not a millionaire bestseller if you are reading this, I promise.) Center the author name to match the title.

A series name can be fairly prominent, but only if you are marketing mainly to people who are already invested in the series. If it's the first book in the series, or if you're trying to attract people who have never heard of the series before, a prominent series name looks like you're trying too hard. You're already super-invested in this universe, but your prospective readers aren't, and they really, really don't care what you've named said universe, or that you have binders of maps for it dating back to third grade. You can put the series name in the less visible small text to help people who already like your stuff if you want, though.

What I call the small text is the text that is on the cover, but is not large enough to be read from a distance, or by anyone who isn't already sort of interested in the book. It should be, well, small. Readable by someone who is already holding the book, but otherwise not, and not anything that would draw the eye from the title.

It should use the same font as your author byline, only smaller. You can use a different color, but stick to the colors-on-metals rules, and no more than two text colors total. If it's at the top or bottom of the cover (you can put it in your title's vertical margin space if you have one) it should be centered like the title and and author. If it's toward the center, you can play with it a little bit more, and adjust it to fit around the image (the way you can't with the title) or the lettering of the title.

And, of course, it should not distract from the title at all.

I'm not going to discuss what should be in the content of your smalltext, but as long as it's small enough to not be readable at a distance, and is integrated into the rest of the design, and doesn't distract from the title, the content doesn't really have any effect on how professional your design looks.

Not counting title and author, don't put more than two more pieces of small text on the cover. More than that, it gets distracting and too busy. Extra text you really need to get on the cover can be moved to the back.

Here are my sample covers with the byline shifted a little and an AO3 bookmarker's text as the blurb:

At this point, the sample covers are already both to where if I saw them, I would go, "This is either a small publisher who is almost there, or a designer at a big publishing house who was having a bad day."

Which is still miles beyond where they were when they started, and considering I spent zero money and did it on my spare time at work the day before holiday break, is pretty good.

Here's an animation of all the versions because animations are fun.

The next step in levelling-up is "how do I pick my cover art so it looks like a professional cover", but I think that's going to be a separate post, possibly posted on a day when people are actually online. Stay tuned! (Spoiler: the key is "if it distracts people from reading your title, change it.")

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

this was a very informative read. thank you!

Glad it seems useful!

not directly useful to me (novel covers imply one has enough words to constitute a novel, which is not likely to happen from me anytime soon). nonetheless, a fascinating look into something that i knew nothing about, and now know quite a bit more.

V. cool.

Sadly, one of the biggest immediate indicators that screams "ameteur book production" to me is (1) something that makes reading actively less pleasant, and (2) something authors have almost no control over. Physical books produced by many of the self-pub outlets have an extremely tight binding, stiff paper, unpleasantly sharp corners, and a general disregard for the physical experience of reading. They come out a lot like ARCs and print-on-demand books, neither of which is all that pleasant. It's not something I'd have noticed at all until I started experiencing it, but it's astonishing how much an over-tight binding can pollute the reading transaction.

A lot of self-pub and small-pub books these days *are* print-on-demand: if you're doing smallish print runs (I mean, not just tiny runs, but in the range of hundreds at a time rather than thousands, especially if you're doing combined ebook & print sales and a lot of your volume is ebooks) it can be a lot more economical to just do POD for the physical copies, even though the markup's less, because the overhead is so much lower. At the cons a lot of the small-publishing-house people were sharing recs of POD places to get your physical copies through.

...and yeah, so many times the physical quality of the books are just crap. Although to be fair the quality of pro-published trade paperbacks is dropping too. :/

If I tried to do a post on how to get your book printed it for quality it would get way out of control, though!

Hahaha, I was reading along thinking BUT NO WHAT ABOUT THE KERNING and then you got to that. So good timing, there.

When I was working on this post I was sitting there staring at a selfpub book I have checked out from the library and going, "that's a perfectly good font, so why does it look so fundamentally selfpub?" and then suddenly I was like, oh, kerning! KERNING! And now I can't stop noticing the bad kerning in selfpub covers. :/

This is an excellent post and you should be proud of it!

And yeah, once you learn to spot kerning disasters, you will NEVER STOP. I worked on my high school newspaper (news editor two years, editor-in-chief one year) and although we were doing the actual layout in Pagemaker, the paper had just switched a few years back (this was the early 90s) and so the faculty advisor made us all learn how to hand-kern while we were doing the pasteups, that being back in the days when you'd print the broadsheets and then paste them up and deliver the paste-ups to the printer rather than delivering a digital file. It really is an art rather than a science, and it's very font-dependent!

Do you know about the Kerning Game? It's a hell of a lot of fun, and more than that, it gives you practice and shows you the 'expert''s opinion overlaid with your own after each exercise.

We did a long unit on hand-setting letterpress type in Tech Ed in middle school, so I've done that kind of manual kerning (so tedious! yet fascinating!)

...when I was doing the literary magazine, however, we learned absolutely nothing about typesetting or design. I don't think the newspaper club did either. Alas.

...I have not played that game, it looks dangerous.

Ooh, the Kerning Game is fun, though I kern much tighter on most of those fonts so I had to readjust my first attempt when the final letter wouldn't move.

I was reading this and kept wondering if the story title you're using is a pun. (my guess is yes) XD

This was informative and fun. And as much as I like Copperplate Gothic, it's too 'straight' to go well w/ the stripes in the flag in the background image, which is what was totally throwing that one off for me. The slightly curved font works much better.

It's sort of a pun, in that I tried to come up with a pun and didn't really manage a good one?

I like copperplate fonts and I probably could have arranged that one to work better with the image (the curvier one I ended up with doesn't really work as well with the image as I'd like, either) but Copperplate Gothic is really obviously a 'windows default' font for me so it had to go.

I'm afraid to start adjusting kerning. It feels like once I start I'll never stop. Or ever be happy again.

Yeaaaah it's a temptation. But really, 'not enough kerning adjustment' is still way better than 'none at all'. Get someone else to do it for you?

But that is not true about the title or the author always being giant on covers of professionally published books. Like, the cover design of the Suhrkamp paperbacks is considered a classic modern book design look here and they looked like this for many years:

It's not true about color choice either, like on this cover the text is large but it is blue on blue:

There is a strategy by publishers here that designs books to be immediately at a distance recognizable as that publisher, like all have the same color or the same cover design. It's becoming less common as publishers design more based on the model you describe and they all go to more look like Sensational! Pulp! Covers!, but the other strategy still exists.

Like, Reclam does this, in part because they sell affordable paperback classics, which are all yellow unless they are in the original language when they are red, or blue when the are commentary for students, but they also publish new things, and their high end hardcover editions of classics also all have a consistent design, like they have a Latin/German Ovid metamorphosis edition with etchings by Picasso that costs 50€ (presumably because of the additional costs of the quality reproduction, also it is long) but on the cover there isn't a picture of an etching, nor is Picasso mentioned, nor is the author or title large. It looks like this:

Both of your first two examples scream "Designed in 1960/70 and never updated" to me. Which was of course modern for the time and long term branding is definitely a thing. Like you said, it's instantly recognizable. But if you're looking for covers that fit the current style you see on American shelves, I think this guide is pretty accurate.

Yes, I realize that current US covers are not designed like this. Current German genre fiction mostly isn't either, and many publishers have abandoned signature covers, like paperbacks by the publisher dtv used to be all white with a graphic on them (like the cover for White Fang used to be this for a long time, which is not the current taste anymore at all but quite distinct, but the current one is this and they seem to change it in one generic way r another quite frequently judging by the number of covers I can choose from on book indexing sites).

So you are right that my examples have roots in classic modern design more than current ones (though the second example was first published in 1989, I don't know when exactly the publisher developed that design signature.)

The point I wanted to highlight is that there are different ways to be noticeable, and that book covers don't need to adhere to a narrow formula to work and be well and professionally designed. I have to admit that I find many US covers in the currently dominant style unappealing, because they seem too "loud". I much prefer calmer covers and wish we'd get more of those again. Though many current German covers aren't quite as loud as US ones.

I did say this was to look like you came from an NYC publishing house! Other publishing cultures are different, yeah, and I don't know as much about them. (And I don't particularly like that current house style - a lot of the covers look really ugly to my eyes - but this is about capturing that house style so that your book will not stand out as self-pub, not about looking classically stylish. And I do appreciate not having to squint to read the titles.)

I think all the covers you posted would fit under the exception I mentioned for books that are trying to sell a brand rather than a particular title, though. The US also has publisher series of reprints of classics that do that kind of thing. (And some academic presses that put small-audience specialty publications under standard covers.) They're not trying to sell an individual title, though: they're trying to attract people with brand loyalty, who already know they like that publisher's reprints and also already know they want that particular book.

For a selfpub author or small indy press with no brand loyalty, who's trying to attract people who've never heard of them or who have heard of them but don't want to put a lot of effort in to find a book, that's not really the marketing style you need to emulate. (Or. I mean. It could be; what do I know? But it won't make your book pass as a new release from a large NYC house.)

Also the first two of those covers look like they were printed in one color of ink on dyed paper? Which is something that was a lot more common in the mid-20th century, when printing with limited colors of ink was significantly cheaper and easier to do than full-color processes. That's not really the case anymore; full-color photo-quality printing is cheap enough that even books with only two colors on the cover almost always use the full-color process, and trying to mimic the covers with limited color looks like you're being deliberately vintage. (And again, that might be what a selfpub author wants to do! But these days, unless you have a huge amount of brand recognition, it's going to make your book look like a hipster small-run chapbook.)

I think my point is that I just do not get why US books (almost) all follow this formula you outline. I mean some look decent enough but as you say some are really ugly, and worse, IMO, even if they aren't bad they all sort of blur together in this generic, mediocre thing. And why would or should self-publishing trot along the same path when graphic design could be so much better. I mean, it's like arranging your lovingly cooked food in a tray as if it was an industrial ready-to-eat tv dinner, because that is one professional dinner arrangement template and at least you won't completely fail trying to arrange it like a professional chef.

Here while many book covers follow your points, some do not, and it is not just established classic ones. Like, to find current examples, I looked at a big German publisher that puts out things like contemporary fiction, thrillers, mysteries etc. I'd say from the mental image I have of them they aren't pulp but not one of the snobbish literary fiction publishers either (actually historically they regained popularity in post-war Germany doing the sacrilege of printing literature as paperbacks on really cheap paper starting in with a rotary printing press and even putting ads in the middle of the books). Anyway, many of theirs look generic in a similar way to your NYC publishing house ones, but not all are the same and the different ones aren't all in a branded design or by known authors either. Like, I browsed down the publisher page and saw a contemporary fiction one (from the blurb it seems to be a love story of a young Israeli in Berlin who explores the past of his ancestors who were Holocaust survivors or something like that) by an author I had never heard of that is coming out early next year (looking at the page it's his first novel, he's done journalistic writing before) and the cover is this. It certainly grabbed my attention on the webpage, and not just because I specifically looked for different covers.

Admittedly a bold pattern as your cover is somewhat unconventional, but at least it stands out (though admittedly I have no idea how this pattern might relate in any way to the content of the novel, LOL).

I guess I just find it kind of depressing to have book covers be so narrow, when cover design could be so diverse, and still be slick, effective and professional, and not looking like a painful 90s gif-art or such, as self-publsihed covers admittedly can look when they go wrong.

I think it's because Americans don't like objects as objects but as signifiers. This hasn't always been true. The Everyman Series were cloth-covered hardbound books and their covers were fabric color, title, and the Everyman logo which was Prometheus running a burning torch. The idea was literate people could save up and order books that looked interesting, were proven and would be suited to exchanging with other literate people.

In my own lifetime I've gone from most printing being single ink color (I used a clean McDonald's bag to wrap something once upon a time and now it's a document) to where EVERTHING is four color. Before that was Life magazine and pre-packaged foods.

I agree with so much of this, but I'd add that you can break some of these rules if you work with the image. Does the picture have solid color areas? Fit the text around that, instead of overlapping. Design elements that draw your eye in a certain direction? Follow those lines and put some of the text there. You did this a little bit when you shifted the author's name and added the blurb - look at the way the text ends up grouped around the eagle, but you didn't discuss it. But this may be more advanced graphic design.

My experience of modern book covers is that, in whatever style guides the NYC publishers are using anyway, you can't ever fit the title text around the image. You can pick an image where a giant centered title *does* fit around the image, but the minute you start shifting bits of the title around so they don't block bits of the image, it starts looking less pro. (The sample cover with the image on it looks less pro because that's not an image that's ever going to look right with that style of design, but I deliberately didn't put a lot of work into picking and adapting the image for it.)

This is hard for me because my instinct is to fit the words around the picture, but that's just not how they do it? The giant title text is The Most Important Thing, and the image has to work with it, not the other way around.

But yeah, if I get to writing the post about picking the image, part of that is picking an image where the composition of the image draws the eye toward the title text (which that flag & eagle image doesn't really do, and probably was never going to do well, so I didn't really talk about it here.) And you can definitely pick the vertical placement of the text to work with those compositional elements.

But if you want it to look like a pro cover, that title text you're working with is going to be at least a couple inches high, fill the width of the page, and be centered.

(Yeah, there is an occasional exception to this, but they're people who do everything else so perfectly in line with pro style that they can get away with breaking rules, and people who need to read this post definitely are not there.)

Maybe I'm more used to YA titles where the're only centered about 75% of the time, the rest being right or left justified around a center image. Or roughly centered with multiple lines of text following an image line. But that definitely takes more skill.

I'm currently looking at the face out books on the shelves opposite my work desk. and the one other thing I'd add is that if you've got a long title, multiple lines and varied sizing (most important words larger) are your friends.

J and YA titles tend to be a little more flexible with the covers (so does nonfiction), but even those are centered the vast majority of the time, from what I see. And if it's not, they'll do a title that's not fully centered, but still uses centering somehow, and does clever stuff with the composition of the image to still make where the title is *feel* like the center, so that the image is still shaped around the title, rather than the reverse.

And most people who are still figuring out kerning can't do that stuff.

(Although also, I think most of the YA I deal with is fantasy/SF/historical/etc. and that tends to be more in line with the styles used for adult fantasy/SF than the 'realistic' YA is, which often wants to look like 'literature', which means taking more risk with the design.)

Oh, I agree completely. I do a lot of graphic design in my job (and look at a lot of books) so I forget that not everyone sees what I see.

You might also want to do something on the design of the spine which is where I see a lot of self- & small publishers fall down.

But I don't stare at spines all day! (Or backs.) You can do that post. :P

Once you added the dark blue background, I went, "wait, now this looks like someone's thesis". Color assosciations are weird. ;)

My favorite kerning lulz ever is something that was meant to be read as "due to their specialties", but because of kerning, reads as "due to their special ties". OVER AND OVER AGAIN, THIS HAPPENED. I always wonder what makes their ties so special.

(the line spacing is why, when I do text icons, every line of text is a different layer, so I can adjust individually. I can never get it how I want otherwise. But I'm using ancient Paint Shop Pro 9.)

...I think I've been reading too much a/b/o fic, I knew what made their ties special...

I may have done some kerning back in the day by converting to an image and adjusting each letter on its own layer.

Re: kerning: Just a couple of days ago I saw a billboard that had the phrase "XX is on fire." Except the "o" in "on" was a picture of a wreath, which made it wide enough that it made it look like "XX ison fire" and it took me a second to figure out what it was supposed to say. BAD advertising.

Ah, the joy of kerning!

I've just looked at the library hardbacks we have out at the moment, and nearly all have the author's name bigger or the same size as the title (though many are exceptionally well-known authors, eg Mantel, Pratchett). Very few have an overall image; it is mostly an image placed on a dark ground such that the text looks nice on top. The best, I think, was this Michael Dobbs thriller (which is utterly unreadable). Several, like this, overlapped the text of the author & title a smidge, which I think can give a sense of depth. One of the worst (that still looked at all professional) was this version of Bring up the Bodies -- it looks better online but in print the red behind the author's name is too dark and parts of the title look poorly kerned to me.

Yeah, an author who has enough publishing history & name recognition will almost always have the name centered & large instead of the title (And there are authors like that who self-publish!) But in that case you can just swap out everything I said about "title" with "author" and vice versa.

Huh. See, I really dislike the Michael Dobbs cover; it looks like a hot confusing mess. (It looks like a pro cover, don't get me wrong, but it's way too busy for me and that neon-on-black stuff is really overused). Bring Up The Bodies isn't going to win any art awards, but I personally like the cleaner design a lot more.

The Dobbs I think is good at conveying (correctly) it is not the kind of book I would enjoy. The Mantel conveys very little other than that Mantel is a BN Author...

*grins* I totally do most of these things for my podfic cover art, whee! (Mostly the part where the title damn well needs to be as readable as possible on a small ipod screen.)

I think colour and image choice is very important to attract the types of readers you are looking for (e.g. urban fantasy always has a certain look to it), but it's certainly not that important for looking professional.

You'd think "make your title readable" was a gimme, but so many people can't figure it out. (even on, like, signs on stores...)

A good choice of color is important for looking professional, and the colors-on-metals-or-vice versa is a good shorthand. And pretty much every new pro book I see come by uses it, so if someone doesn't, it doesn't mean their cover is bad, but it'll stand out from most of the pro covers.

Thank you for this! I'll be bookmarking it for later. This is great, because I'm planning to self-publish at some point!

Yay! I hope it is helpful.

After reading this I got a hankering to redo the cover to my little self-pub Kindle story.
Here's the Before: https://athenasdesk.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/owtsascover-final72dpi-small.jpg

And the After: https://athenasdesk.wordpress.com/portfolio/out-where-the-sun-always-shines/

Still not perfect (KERNING!) but I feel it's much improved, thanks to you! If you ever write part 2 to this post let me know so I can devour it! :D

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How To Make A Selfpub Book Cover That Looks Like It Came From An NYC Marketing Department Part 1

The only purpose of the cover is to get people to read the title of the book

1. MAKE IT BIG.

2. Center the title horizontally.

3. Colors for clarity

4. Your Font Should Be Invisible

5. Manually Adjust Spacing and Kerning

Bonus Level: The other cover text

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Cover Makeover: Before and After