Designing a Book Cover – 4 Things to Consider
It’s been an exciting few weeks! Most importantly, here’s the book cover:
Designing a Book Cover – Tips
#1 – Do market research.
What are people buying now? Go to Amazon and type in your keywords. For my book it might be “historical fiction, witch”. A list of the top selling books with their covers will be there. Most witch books use black and white with elements of either red, purple or green, which is why I used those colors. What is your genre? The cover of a Regency romance will look very different from a personal finance book. The cover clues in the reader what to expect when they read your book.
How does the text feel?
Witches are notoriously prickly people, which is why I went with sharp letters. If this were a children’s book or a romance, I might have chosen “w” with a rounded bottom to soften the tone and look.
Genre Focus
My book is an action adventure set in 1739, so my cover needed to reflect both “action/adventure” and “historical fiction” elements with the primary focus being the story genre rather than the time period. (It’s historical fiction, after all.) The stormy waves provide the visual excitement with the type of ship and the girl’s dress give hints about the time period. If your book was a thriller set in Manhattan, the cover might have a knife dripping blood with the New York skyline in the background.
Self-made or Outsourced?
I hired Stuart Bache to do the cover design. He’s out of the UK and he spoke at The History Quill conference last year, which is where I found him. I filled out the form in early October to get the design done by mid-January. (He’s got a waitlist) and the cost was about $700.
He sent two initial concepts, the one above (which I fell in love with) and an all-text sample with just the book title in a spooky font with an 18th century ship at the bottom. I went with the girl because she looks exactly as I envisioned my young protagonist, Annaliese.
A cheaper resource is Fiverr.com where you can hire freelance cover designer at various rates. I hired someone from Fiverr to do a basic mock-up and it was $45. In the story Annaliese, the little girl, burns her doll’s hand, so we tried out that concept. Here’s what it looked like:
Excellent choice for the cover! Looking forward to reading your book!
Thanks!