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On Design: How to Design a Book Cover
On Design: How to Design a Book Cover
Whether you want to design your own book cover or simply want to understand the process to better communicate with someone you hire, this article should explain enough to help you make educated decisions about your book cover.
Elements of a Book Cover
The elements you need to prepare to create your book cover include everything that NEEDS to appear. You may include more if you wish – but they are not mandatory.
Make sure that you legally own the right to use every one of these elements (yes, including “free” downloaded art, fonts, etc. and even quotes of reviewers. Refer to another article about the difference between the Easy Way and the Correct Way to Book Design.)
- Your name
- Your title
- YOUR BLURB
- Any and all images (photos/paintings/artwork/etc.)
- Any and all logos
- Your ISBN/s and bar code
- Quotes/Reviews/Endorsements
- Any and all Fonts you will use
YOUR BLURB: Marketing communicates the commercials needs of an art project in a document/folio called The Creative Brief. I will post an entire separate topic on that – but the most important part of a book’s Creative Brief is the BLURB. The entire commercial value of a book is the blurb. That’s the single point of failure for the project. The illustrator will be illustrating the blurb – not the book. If the blurb and the cover don’t match, the cover fails and the book won’t sell.<div>
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A Word on Design:
The word design means “to solve a problem”. It concerns itself with more than simply “How does it solve the problem” but also considers “Why”.
The problem Graphic Designers and Book Designers are trying to solve is “How do we sell this book?”
Notice that this is a different question than “How do we explain what the book is about?” In fact, many times, book designs will violate a book’s details (or even its premise) to sell the book better.
Famous examples are Jim Butcher’s character Harry Dresden wearing a hat on most covers and Pat Rothfuss’ character Kvothe featured as a 20-something romance novel hero carrying a perfectly intact lute. Harry Dresden specifically states how much he hates hats (first novel) and Kvothe’s story is about him as a child when his father’s lute gets shattered into pieces.
Now there are hundreds of tips & tricks & techniques to sell a book – and they aren’t a menu, but a list of rules to obey. Follow the rules, and you will do well.
Rule #1: Composition and The Visual Hierarchy
Composition in art means the structure of the visual scene.
The Visual Hierarchy is the order in which your audience will look at that scene LITERALLY. It means where their eyes point first, second, third, etc. This is a scientifically proven principal that you must not violate.
Unless you use specific tricks to lead the audience’s eyes somewhere unexpected (that requires more knowledge than this article can share), you must obey this order.
The sequence of where the human eye looks at a book cover (or anything, for that matter).
- Center of the book, 2/3 from the bottom. If the book were a face, that is where its eyes would be. Research has proven that humans learn to look for the “eyes” of any object at this location before they look at anything else.
- The upper corner, left or right, depending on the written language of the audience. Latin-script readers (e.g., in English), have been trained to instantly look to the upper left hand side of a page to begin reading. This has become innate. Middle-eastern script readers (e.g., Hebrew), have been trained to look to the upper-right. Kanji is all over the place and left-and-right does not mean as much, although right-to-left is how books are often published.
- The opposite upper corner for the same reasons stated.
- Back to the original side and down to the middle (as if reading)
- Down from there to the lower 1/9, but staying on the same-side.
- Lower center.
- Lower opposite-side.
- Middle Center (returning almost to the eyes)
- Middle opposite-side.
Notice that this creates a kind of spiral pattern. This spiral is part of what is called the Golden Section, which is related to the Fibonacci sequence.
This can be manipulated by the designer in many ways. Examples: Leave empty spaces where you want someone to skip. Add content where you want them to focus. But since the human eye doesn’t teleport, you need visual guides to entertain the eye in that direction. For example, have a figure point where you want them to look. Have any linear element link the two spaces. Use more engaging colors where you want to focus and less engaging colors you want them to skip.
If you study other book covers, you will that many just take up the entire top third of a book with the author’s name and the lower third with the title (or vice versa), leaving almost nothing for the artwork.
Others will focus on the artwork first.
Others still will be expertly playful with the visual hierarchy to interact with the reader before they even open the book.
No, it’s not simple – so stick to the basics:
Put your most important content center, 2/3 up. That could be the title, the author’s name, or an illustration’s focal point.
If your name is important (e.g., you are famous), then put that content first. If your title is part of a series you want people to remember first, put that content first. If your characters or genre or theme is what draws a buyer first, then use that. (Example: Romance, Fantasy, and SF, feature artwork of characters and themes more often that mysteries, because some publishers believe that new readers are shopping for themes over name recognition.) </div>
Rule #2: The Audience
As stated above, the very language a reader is used to affects how they interpret a book cover. If they read in the opposite direction from how you laid out your content, they will be confused.
You also have to use symbols they understand in ways that are exciting but not confusing.
Rule #3: Colors
Different demographics react to colors differently. Red is universally the most attention getting color – but it still means something different to different people. Red is blood and meat and edible berries. It instinctually means fight-or-flight. However, in China – that is pushed to the extreme. Red is never used in a negative way. It is the most sacred color – and even the color of weddings. Some greens means “natural” and other greens mean “unnatural”. Make sure you know which green to use. Black and white can be used as opposites but even that is fraught with social dangers. But you also want to stand out from the crowd. Just because yellow means sunshine, doesn’t mean you have to use it that way. Just because red means danger and black means mysterious, doesn’t mean using them guarantees it will be engaging. If you use black and red for a murder mystery, you risk being the same on the shelf as too many others. This is where you have to do shelf-studies. Being predictable is just as bad as being incorrect.
Choose your colors wisely.
Rule #4: Lines, Shapes, and Patterns
This is complicated, so I will just give platitudes and generalizations that, while bendable, must be done with extreme care to do right.
Sharp angles can mean danger. Soft curves can mean peace. Wide shapes can mean encompassing (spread across the world). Tall shapes can mean divinity (connecting the earth to the sky). Men react to solid shapes and colors positively, and patterns negatively (generalization), while woman react to complex shapes and patterns positively. There are many proposed theories to this market-researched fact – and many suggest that ancient hunters developed male brains to ignore patterns to find animals hiding in the landscape. I don’t know if the theory is correct, but arguing against the research is pointless. Unless it’s a military or hunting themed product, do not put a patterned print on something marketed to men. This includes a book cover.
This rule applies to fonts as well. You don’t just pick a cool one. You pick one that means something to your audience.
Again, these are platitudes and generalizations, but have tons of research behind them. Play with it at your own risk.
Rule #5: Symbols
Find the balance between being understood and being trite. This is also called “being predictable” and “being cliche”. You want your readers to understand what they are looking at, but you don’t want to tell them the whole thing. You can use common symbols – you should just use them in an interesting way that is new. Of course, it’s best if that ties into the content. Trite written imagery will result in trite artistic images. Symbols don’t have to be logos – they can also be characters, objects, time itself, ad infinitum.
(It should be mentioned that if you read Dan Brown and his novels around artist symbols, you should know that the science of symbols is NOT called Symbology, it is called Epigraphy.)
Picking what images to use for your cover art is a powerful thing.
When you use an image of a character, that can lock that character down in the imagination of the reader before they ever read a word. That is both a huge benefit and a terrible risk.
Remember Harry Dresden? The novel is clear when the character says “I hate hats” and never wears one. But it’s hard to find any fan art of Harry Dresden without a hat – and fan cosplay as him with a hat…even when they know better. So while it was a terrible interpretation of the text – it was marketing genius. So why the hat? Well the character wears a hat in one scene, then takes it off angry and says he will never do so again. So it IS a scene from the story. However, what it does more than that is root the setting as being the modern world with magic. Also, his hat is a “cool” hat like Indiana Jones, so the association works. But lastly, it helps obscure the character’s features. That is important because fans will obsess over how a character looks. If you want fans to imagine the character is their particular sexual fetish, then you should not make the character too distinct on the cover…unless you hire one of the best illustrators in the world to give you an ideal your fans will obsess over.
If you have an important symbol in your novel, it can be perfect to use that symbol, even by itself (e.g., Hunger Games Mocking Jay Pin)…as long as it is uniquely yours. No one remembers generic symbols. Worse, no one buys them either. If you’re going to use a common symbol, like a yin-yang, you better make it special like Todd Lockwood’s white and black dragon painted into a yin-yang made of stone in the middle of a wintery forest. THAT stands out.
Other incredibly important symbol choices include landscape, weather, time of year and day, clothing, etc.
The hardest part of selecting symbols is selecting ones that matter and are unique – it is so hard that a lot of publishers don’t even bother anymore. They hire a junior designer and slap a gun or a knife on the cover of a crime novel. They put a string of pearls on a cozy mystery. They just don’t care anymore.
I want you to care.
Rule #6: Positions and Juxtapositions
The juxtaposition between symbols is just as telling as the symbols themselves.
This is the hardest rule for even artists to get. Position matters.
If you are selling to an English speaking audience, put the hero on the left, facing the villain on the right. (Or put the hero in the center).
Because of the visual hierarchy previously explained, the English reader will automatically adopt the character on the left who faces right as the POV character. They put themselves in the character’s position and are seeing what they see on the right and feel what they feel.
Even artists get this wrong. What commonly happens is that the artists forget to put themselves into the characters POV, and instead imagines themselves witnessing the hero from afar. This is a flat-out error by the artist. I’ve seen this happen more frequently when male artists paint female heroes – they are so used to seeing woman from afar, that may be the only way they can imagine them. But if your heroine is meant to be accepted by readers as a strong POV character (especially by women readers), you MUST insist the POV character faces right.
This is especially important if you choose to only refer to character in silhouette. If they face the wrong way – you are telling the reader the wrong story.
And this concept applies to countless other symbols as well.
When placing symbols in a scene, it can matter which symbol is read first. If you place two crosses next to each, one up and one down in reference to some people’s beliefs in demonology – it matters which is on the left and which one in on the right. The left object is the “starting state” and the right object is the “ending state”. So one way, you are describing a horror story about the descent of “heavenly” into “hellish”, and the other way, you are telling a redemption-story of “hell” elevating into “heaven”.
In another case, a publishing company was blasted in social media because they had two hands (white and black) clasping in handshake, but the position suggested (some audience’s felt) that the way the hands were holding each other looked like the white hand was oppressing the black hand. Now regardless of how you feel about this level of detail – if your readers care, YOU should care.
Related to this rule are concepts called positive and negative spaces… I can’t begin to go into that in an article this size.
In Summation
This is a lot. If you commit to learning all of these rules and practicing, then you will do great book covers.
If you do not, then understand that these are the rules your graphic designer has trained in and practiced for many years…and hopefully now, when they design something for you, you will understand that they didn’t just throw something together to see “what looks good”.
You should never ever critique a project using the words “I don’t like it”. Your likes and dislikes are not important. What is important is if it is an effective solution to selling your book. Does it inspire the audience to spend money? That’s the goal.
If it doesn’t – then why? Wrong symbols? Wrong color? Wrong message? Wrong characterizations? Wrong visual story-telling? Those are the only questions that matter. They refer to problems that have solutions.
Good luck.
[Please let me know if you find any typos or have any questions I need to clarify.]
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2 Replies
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Interesting Sidenote: IMPO (In My Professional Opinion)
There was a TED Talk video posted recently by a book designer where he bragged about his work. There was one glaring error in his presentation and I have to point it out, because it was insulting.
He was showing off the work he did for a book titled 1Q84…the book was beautiful to look at and interesting to interact with (but nothing special, really. It had been done many many times before and done better.)
However… he screwed up the title.
I feel so bad for that author. I can imagine her horror when she saw the book for the first time.
The book is actually titled “1q84” Noticed but pronounce “1984” – notice how the lower-case letter “q” was used instead of the number “9”. This was absolutely critical to her story about parallel worlds and the subtle differences between them. But her replace the “q” with a “Q” which – while it improved his design – diminished the work the author intended.
Now he bragged about how well it sold, but as David mentions, a lot of that has to do with positioning and promotion and not so much with book design.
Maybe the success of the book has made the author accept the change to their title, I hope so, but any designer who does that to a author’s work has failed their job. He should have designed a different book cover with the correct title and made it just as great.
I am sharing this opinion because it is easy for people outside the profession to take people’s celebrity as reputation. You can find an amazing graphic designer for your book near wherever you live. You just have to look and listen. Hopefully, this series of articles is helping you become a more educated author who can hire the right people and lead your project the right project to get the best results.
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All very specific and wonderful information that I have only read here. Thank you for this!
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