How to Design a Book Cover: Design Tips

Designing a book cover, you will need to come up with the following visual elements: images, text, and information. These elements need to be well-balanced and designed to come up with an attractive book.

Everything You Need to Know to Create a Book Cover:

1. Connect with your audience

We are pretty sure, you already know everything about your target audience. Since people judge a book by its cover, you need to appeal to those who you want to buy your book. You can always find inspiration from other authors who write in the same genre.

2. Settle on graphic design software

There are plenty of options for image editing software to create a book cover, but for print purposes, InDesign is the optimal tool. For those of you who are not as experienced in graphic design but still want to create their own cover, there are plenty of free templates to get you started.

3. Use free stock photographs

Due to copyright regulations, you can’t just go somewhere on the Internet and download whatever images you want. However, what you can do is use websites such as Unsplash or Pexels to find free photographs you can use without attribution.

4. Think about the size of your book

Before designing the book, you need to know how big or small it is going to be. This factor will determine the size of your cover. There are several things to consider when deciding on the size of your cover -- the dimensions of the book, the spinal width, and the common book printing sizes in your genre.

5. Choose typography and do it wisely

A font can make or break your entire book, and there are many things to consider when choosing your fonts. Firstly, you don’t want to choose a font that is rounded, like Comic Sans. Instead, stick to fonts that are clear and easy to read. We also don’t recommend choosing more than 2-3 different fonts.

Types of Book Covers

Illustration-Based

Probably, for an illustration-based book cover, you will have to hire an illustrator, a person who is skilled in drawing and painting. Mind that not all illustrators are skilled in graphic design and that not all graphic designers are skilled in illustrations. Meaning that you might end up hiring two people instead of just one.

Stock Photography

If you have access to stock image platforms like ones we have mentioned above, you can choose from an endless variety of photos, graphics and illustrations. With these, you create very versatile book covers.

Resources to design your own book cover

Canva

Canva has a wide range of free book cover templates to help you kick off the design process.

Poster My Wall

Poster My Wall has many templates and is also connected to Getty Images, Pixabay, and Flickr. When choosing your images you will see the terms and conditions for each image. Like that you can easily find out of you can use a certain image without complications.

Having your book cover professionally designed

If all of these sound too complicated, you can always hire a professional to meet your most daring requirements. However, before you invest in a specialist, make sure that she knows how to design for print. Printing services can be quite strict with your artwork and you need to know how to set up bleed and safe margins.