Studies have proven that we do judge books by their covers, and as self-published authors, we must take this seriously. If you have a poorly designed book cover, whether you design it yourself, have it custom-made, or select a premade book cover, it has to be great. Because a book cover that is anything less than great will hurt your book sales.
1 – High Quality Cover Art
The art for your cover should be a dynamic image that properly represents the genre and story you are telling. It shouldn’t look like a stock photo taken from a free photo website, nor should it look like clip art pulled from your word processing application. Spend some time looking at different book covers for best-selling titles in your genre. What types of images do they use? What information do they include on the cover? What color schemes are they using? Use the answers to these questions to help you figure out what type of cover would be ideal for your book.
2 – Proper Cover Title Font Selections
Font choices on book covers seem like a trivial thing, but they often set the tone for the book. As a self-publishing professional, you need to educate yourself about fonts and how they work both on book covers and the interior layout. Joel Friedlander has a good article on the Top 10 Fonts for Book Covers and Interior Design and another good post from Cover Design Studio about different typefaces and fonts are a good place to start.
3 – Good Cover Text Placement
Even if you select the perfect font for your book cover, there are many other mistakes you can make with placing the text on your cover. Here are a few of them:
- Text too close to the edges of the cover
- Title text is too small and hard to read
- Too much text on the cover – Too much text makes the cover look too busy or even cluttered, especially if you have some nice visual elements on the cover
- Using more than 3 fonts on the cover – Two contrasting fonts work best. Never use more than 3 different fonts on the book cover.
4 – Making the Author’s Name too Large on the Book Cover
There is a myth out there that self-published authors should make their name on the cover very large in order to convince the book buyer that you are a popular, best-selling writer. This is true if you happen to be Stephen King, Suzanne Collins, or John Grisham, but if you are reading this article, you should not try to fool potential readers by blowing up the size of your name to misrepresent how big of a selling point your name is. The reader will see right through it.
5 – Has a Professional Look and Feel
There are millions of book covers out there, and many successful ones use dramatically different design elements, colors, and styles. Spend some time looking at book covers at a book store or library. Which ones do you like? What draws you to them? Book publishers spend a lot of time and effort designing the perfect book cover for every book they print, so steal their cover design ideas.
6 – Designed by Someone Who Designs Book Covers
If you do not have graphic design experience, it is very hard to learn the skills necessary to design a good-looking book cover. Even with some of the fantastic DIY book cover design tools available, the tools cannot be a substitute for skill and experience. And even if you are a graphic design professional, book cover design uses different stylistic choices that only someone familiar with the publishing industry might understand. If you hire a graphic designer, make sure they have experience designing book covers and that they have some example book covers in their portfolio. There are many high-quality book cover design professionals out there who sell designs at a reasonable price.
InstantPublisher Provides Premade Book Covers and Custom Book Covers
InstantPublisher is your full-service self-publishing book printer that provides a large selection of premade book covers and custom book cover designs. Get more information about these services by calling 1-800-259-2592, filling out our online contact form, or sending an email to questions@instantpublisher.com.