What makes a good book cover
Book covers can be a real challenge for authors, and they can even sour the relationship between author and publisher. It’s an area where opinions are strong but actual education, experience, and knowledge is often scarce.
So, in the spirit of harmony, here’s a crash course.
Book covers have three purposes:
1. Hold the book together so all the pages don’t fall on the floor. A very important task!
2. Report the name of the book so people can find it. Also critical! This explains why things like textbooks don’t try very hard—your prof requires that you buy this book, you buy this book, you just need the name on the cover to find it. Another example: note how little effort is made for old classics, say Moby Dick. That book doesn’t need the cover …
3. To help sell the book.
How does this cover succeed at point three? Basically two ways:
· By clueing you into if this book is for you.
Something about the cover—colors, fonts, images—tells you about the book and if it’s what you are looking for, or not. A painting of a shirtless man holding a woman in a flowing dress, wind tousling their hair, English countryside in the background. Romance! But say the book is in fact about how to rebuild a Buick 4-barrel carburetor, they are going to be an unhappy customer. Meanwhile, people looking to get their ‘70 Electra going again won’t find your book. A fail-fail.
To succeed takes knowledge of cover trends and traditions, and this involves using culture-based clues as to its content and its intended audience. Don’t believe me? If you were dropped into a bookstore, you could tell in less than a second if you are in the business, fiction, or car repair sections, right?
· By making the customer take action.
You want a bookstore customer to reach out, pick up the book, and spin it over to find out more (or online, click on it to find out more).
How’s that work? Book covers are basically ads. Ads (at least for the last 50 years or so) don't really tell you all about the product, they tell you a story, one appealing to emotion. They are attractive and pull eyes to it. They set the tone.
Basic design principles apply:
· It should use a font that helps tell people about the story.
· Good artwork of any kind--doubly so for ads/book covers--needs a clear path for the eye (in big agencies, people actually track this). Where does it fall first? second? third?
· Related, don’t forget the rule of thirds. Look it up if you don’t know what that is.
· It should use color theory. See Color Theory for Designers and Best Colors for Book Covers. I’ve had authors say, “I like blue.” To which I reply, “I don’t care—what does your reader like?” That I care about.
All this is why book covers are the purview of marketing. Marketing is a science, a soft science often lacking singular answers, but a science nonetheless.
More about all this on YouTube, below. Good stuff.