LitFire Publishing - The Ins and Outs of Cover Design

When it comes to an actual book, the long-standing maxim of not judging a book by its cover isn’t exactly accurate. Book covers do play a vital role in attracting people—even in audiobooks.

A book cover has a variety of important roles to play, but its primary responsibility is to deliver a book’s flavor in a visually striking and interesting manner. 

It’s also a cover’s responsibility to give a book some character, an identity. Publishers and authors release thousands of books a year. To achieve a monetary goal, the cover art should provide compelling reasons for people to buy the book.

Characteristics of a Good Book Cover

• The cover matches the content.  The cover’s font, layout, style, and message should accurately reflect your story, theme, setting, and the characters. If it doesn’t, you have failed the basic rule of cover design.
  

• Provides insight into the book’s targeted genre, age, and subject matter.  You know it’s a romance novel that targets adults when the cover has a scantily clad man and a beautiful woman caught in a passionate embrace. Similarly, a dark cover that suggests horror and bloodshed instantly tells anyone who the intended audience is.

• Everything written is readable. You want your author name and book title to jump out of the cover so that random book browsers can immediately identify it. You can never go wrong with simple, readable fonts.

•  It’s color-coordinated. Color can also set a book’s mood. When you choose a specific color for the artwork, you also have to choose a color theme. You can either combine colors that complement each other or use different shades of one color.

Here are a few tips to making covers:

Understand the book. A brilliant cover captures both the readers and the story within the pages, so the very first step in creating the best cover is to read and understand the book.

Follow trends. Today, due to the competition within the book industry getting tighter and tighter, designers have raised efforts to create stunning artworks.

Convey emotion through a human face. Body language and facial expression can effectively get the message across, especially if emotion is a strong element of your book.

Times are better for aspiring authors, but to achieve success, you have to stand out. So, remember this guide to make sure your cover is better than everyone else’s—be it for physical books, digital books, or even audiobooks. 

Be careful of hiring designers for your book cover, avoid deception. Find someone you can trust, check out this testimonials from LitFire Publishing authors.