What to do when Designing Book Covers

Designing a successful book cover is an extricate process as writing the novel in the first place. Just like when defining your characters, plot, battles, conversations, or inserting witty repertoire, the appropriate design for your cover needs to be well considered.

So, here are some points that may help when looking to design your own book cover:

The name of the book is 
largest and obvious 
followed by the
author's name in its
own unique position.

The image is singular 
and brazen. The title again
takes prime position with
all fonts interrelated and colour
matched to the cover image.

1. Make sure your cover image matches your genre - The worst thing you can do is try to trick the reader with an inauthentic image that represents something too far removed from the story behind your novel. For instance, you wouldn't place a picture of a fantasy realm with mythical creatures if you had written a hard-hitting detective novel. The reader will very quickly feel misled and may leave a bad review, because let's face it, we shop with our eyes first!
2. Use the correct font and colours - Ensure that your title hits home, ie; it is the clear and definitive within your cover and works coherently with your cover image. Choose colours that are appropriate to the image selected and also make sure they are not too garish or multiple in choice. This also applies to font. Too many variations in font can be confusing and ugly.
3. Never use a copywrite image - This is pretty self-explanatory, avoid any trademarked or copywritten material that could leave you liable.
4. Ensure good structure and layout - The title should take up pride of place within the cover, either in the middle or appropriately placed to create the right sense of drama and that the image does not overwhelm the cover. The author's name should be smaller than the title and placed either directly with the title or in its own space near the bottom (not visually crowded by images or tag lines).
5. Too much text or visual elements - Again, self-explanatory, but if your cover is filled with word after word which is then swamped with a busy visual background, the reader's eye is drawn everywhere and nowhere all at once.
6. Tag lines - If you are going to have a tag line, make sure it is short, sharp, and snappy and doesn't interfere visually with either the title or author's name.
7. Writing a series - If your books are a part of a series, it's okay to use different visual images, but there should be consistency between each novel ie; same font used for titles and author names, similar colours, similar imagery styles etc. Try to show coherency between each jump in novel so that the reader can piece that the series belongs together.

Well, that should get you started, and please feel free to drop a comment if you think there are some other valuable nuggets of information on book design that may help other authors on their writing journey. Also, if you would like your cover assessed, also just drop a visual in the comments and I'll provide some honest feedback.

Kristy😀