The Essential Elements of Book Covers — Derek Barton – 2018

When there are hundreds of new books traditionally published or self-published on a daily basis, how will your work stand out?

When a reader scans through the Amazon or Kindle online sites and spends one to two seconds on your novel’s image, how will you keep their attention?

These are just two of the critical questions you should ask yourself and give serious thought to when it comes to your book’s cover.  The easiest way to make or lose sales depends on how you present your novel.

It is just that simple, and yet, IMPORTANT.

I have possibly two or three of my own works coming out this year so I wanted to be sure I had all the available tools and weapons from the industry at my disposal.  Thus, for the last month, I have been reading articles, documenting notes and discovering just what the professionals consider a “professional book cover”.  What were the keys to the “best” covers and what are the strikes that torpedo cover art?

Here are some of the laws or elements that the professionals have suggested and I have outlined here for you!  They are broken down into three subjects:  Overall Principles, Style and Typesetting.

Overall Principles:

• Keep it simple!
• Let the cover “breathe” —  keep the cover open and not crowded.   If they don’t know what to focus on, they are just going to skip past it.
• Use no more than three different colors and include black, white, or grey.  
• Focus on a theme or emotion.  Relate it to what your story is about.  This is your novel’s billboard after all!
• Find good imagery.  Don’t use anything blurry or cluttered which can confuse the reader and make them move on.

Style:

• Place a darkened border around the edges to make the cover POP or stand out.
• Beware using centered text as it creates a “wineglass effect”.  This effect has become cliché and earmarked as amateurish.
• Create an imaginary box for implied margins.  All your words, titles and names should stay within the box and not go to the edge of your page.
• Consider “ghosted boxes” or page divisions for text.  This can help keep fonts colors from blending or contrasting with your image colors.
• Composition – make a grid of your cover and keep in mind the placement of each item.  This will prevent clusters or odd centering issues.

Typesetting:

• Limit your cover to as few typefaces as you can.  The fewer fonts you have the more simplistic, cleaner look.
• Avoid script and calligraphy typefaces!  If the title or YOUR NAME is hard to read, then what is the point?  I broke this one myself on my first book cover version — It may look awesome to you, but if the reader cannot tell what it says, then no one will care what it says.
• Distressed text should not have uniform letters.  If your font looks like it has marbling, be sure that there isn’t consistent marbling in each letter or it will not look natural.
• Don’t stretch or condense words!
• Kern your text – letter spacing.  Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.  It will also prevent your words from being misinterpreted.

As I stated above, these are just the most consistent laws or elements discussed when describing the fundamentals to book cover art that I have found.  There are other factors that can produce or reduce sales.  And sometimes there are “break out” covers that will not adhere to these rules and are very successful.  It all comes down to fan judgment and book sales success to really know if you scored well on your book cover design.

I truly hope that this is beneficial to your own book cover creations and if you have a suggestion or an element that you would suggest, feel free to comment.