4 Random Tips: Book Cover Design Crash Course - Part 3

 

Here we are! Last day of "Book Cover Design Crash Course." I hope it's been helpful to you so far! I know I've had a lot of fun designing the covers for this and sharing my random tips with y'all. 😊

And . . . now here are the last four tips, and these are even more random than before. As in, I didn't even try to give them a single theme.

Now, let's dive in!

*Note: All of the covers were designed by me on the free Canva website, my favorite place to create book covers and other graphics. Unless otherwise noted, all of the stories and authors are completely imaginary; I made them all up. Please don't use any of the covers in this post without my permission.*

Color Scheme

Remember when you were a little kid (or maybe you still do it 😏), and you would color with bright crayons without worrying about how the colors looked together? All you cared was that you made a pretty picture.

Well, we can't do that with book covers. Yes, we want to make sure that we get a "pretty picture," but we can't neglect things like how the colors go together.

Take a look at this cover.

Pretty cover, right? But do you see the issue? *hint: look at the heading for this section 😁*

Yep. The colors are all off. The flowers and the box around Hailey Baker's name (did you notice that she came back from Week 1?) are both bright yellow. But . . . I'm not seeing any reason for bright yellow to have a prominent place on this cover. Actually, it kind of clashes with the girl's blond hair.

And see the pink arrow? Where on earth does pink come in?

Now, what if we choose a color that subtly matches the background, and then make the frame, the flowers, the arrow, and even the faint outline/shadow around the author's name that color? We could even filter the picture a little to give the cover a more uniform color scheme.

See the difference? Now the cover is still pretty, but also professional.

Bottom line here? Let your inner nerd out and spend some time making sure everything matches. You might be surprised at how much more professional your cover turns out!

Focal Point

This is a problem I see quite often with indie book covers, but not near as much with traditionally published ones. Let's try to fix this problem, so no one looks at our cover and finds a reason to belittle self-publishing!

What exactly am I talking about?

We need a focal point—that one thing that draws your eye as soon as you see a book cover. It doesn't have to be anything extremely obvious. But it needs to be there.

Our focus needs something to latch onto, something to relate the whole cover back to. 

   

If you're into photography, you might know exactly what I'm talking about. You know those really neat pictures where you focus on one thing—say, one flower in a meadow—and then let the camera blur the rest of the background out? That's what I'm talking about. Often, it's just more subtle for book covers.

Take a look at the covers of some of the popular books on your shelves, or even the book covers I used as examples on previous posts (linked here and here). What's the one thing that jumps out at you? A person? An object that the picture is focused on? The big, bold words that take up half the cover?

Let's look at an example. 

You might not be able to see anything wrong with this cover. Nice fonts, a well-filtered picture, easy-to-read text, a little uniqueness, a color scheme . . . 

But there's nothing on the cover that jumps out at me and immediately demands my attention. The word "West" does somewhat, but we could do a whole lot better.

*Quick flashback: Remember what I said last week about landscape pictures? There's nothing wrong with using them, but you have to make sure they don't look plain and empty. Here's a good way to do that.*

By just playing around with the title, look what we could do:

Now, there we go! Doesn't that title just jump out at you immediately? The cover doesn't look so empty and boring, either.

If you can't figure what's wrong with your book cover, but something just isn't working, try reevaluating your focal point. You might be surprised at how much better it makes your cover!

Genre

We touched on this a little in Week 1. But let's go beyond fonts and look at the whole cover.

Now, don't try to design a cover unless you know what covers in your genre look like. That's just a really bad idea.

But, chances are, you know what other covers look like.

We do want our cover to be unique, and to jump out at readers. But we also need it to match our genre.

I know how important this is just from being a picky reader. If I'm scrolling Amazon or browsing the shelves at a bookstore or library, I can often tell from a quick glance if this book is something I want to look into or not.

If I see swirling fonts, pastel colors, and whimsical sketchings, I can (safely) assume that this isn't a legal thriller.

If I see bold fonts, a lot of black and white, and no decorations save for a few straight lines . . . this probably isn't a sweet, Depression-era romance.

See what I mean?

While those are extreme examples, you need to make sure to analyze your cover based on genre. Otherwise, you might disappoint some readers and lose even more potential ones. Because I might not pick up your pastel legal thriller—even if I would like it—when that bold-font historical romance is calling my name. And, assuming that I was actually looking for a legal thriller, I'm probably going to be pretty disappointed.

Let's see another extreme example of this (because what fun would designing a subtle example be? 😄).

This cover might not be perfect, but nothing is screaming at me that it's wrong.

Except - remember Katie Jones? Yeah. She wrote Find Me, which definitely looked an action-packed suspense novel.

I'm not saying that she couldn't have switched to fantasy. Lots of authors don't stick to one genre.

But I know Katie Jones better than y'all do (well, taking into consideration that she doesn't actually exist 😁), and she has no intentions of ever writing a medieval fantasy.

Her newest story, Gone Til Forever, is a suspense book (set in a big city, at that) with some sci-fi elements.

Not the feel I'm getting from this cover.

Now, keeping the same basic structure, here's a redesigned cover:

Ah! That's a whole lot better for this story. Don't you think?

Uniqueness

This is the last point in the whole series, but that surely doesn't mean that it's not important. Actually, it's one of the most important things. Even if you don't remember anything else from this series, remember this:

Make your book cover unique.

You have a writing voice that is all your own. You have characters that are individuals in their own right. You have a plot that you've never read before now. You have a message to share that only you could write.

So make your book cover unique, too.

This doesn't mean that you have to have a bizarre, risky cover. Not at all.

It just means that you need to think outside the box a little. Don't go with the first font you find, don't pick a meaningless picture, don't slap your text on first blank space, don't always arrange the words just the same as a "standard" cover.

If you're a writer, then you're creative. So let your creativity show with your book cover, too!

Here's an example of a "standard" cover. Common fonts, common arrangement.

Now, this cover is certainly pretty! But it's not unique. It doesn't look like the author put much effort into it. If you're skimming book covers, looking for that one book, would this stand out to you?

Maybe not. It looks like just another cover, just another story.

So let's get creative. Let's turn this beautiful but dull cover into something eye-catching—without changing a ton of things.

I know it's not much, but wouldn't this stand out just a little better? And we didn't even have to touch the picture itself!

Bottom line? Think outside the box. Don't just drop some text onto a pretty picture. This is your cover, your story, so make it stand out!

Well, that wraps up this series! I hope you've enjoyed it! Let me know if you have any other questions!

What did you think of today's covers? Which was your favorite? Was this blog series helpful?