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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.")