How to cite your designer on your book cover, and why you should

I’m still a little self-conscious when it comes to adding “cover design by Derek Murphy” on the back of my book cover designs. It feels like I’m installing secret spyware. I rarely recommend it, as it seems so self-serving, and yet it’s my responsibility to help authors get their book covers as professional as possible. Pick up almost any traditionally published book and it will have the cover designer’s name on the back, somewhere on the bottom in small text.

It’s almost always a name rather than a company; probably because it sounds more personal, like an artist, rather than faceless, like a cookie-cutter corporate grind out. So I would write “Cover Design by Derek Murphy” rather than “Cover Design by Creativindie”. No website or url is necessary – urls are overrated these days; it’s much faster to just go google my name than type in the link.

What if I designed my own book cover?

There’s two ways to go about indie publishing. One is to hide it: so then you’d want to ‘fake’ your publisher imprint, book cover designer, etc by either A) not listing it at all or B) making up fake names and companies to make you look big. This can work well, as most people won’t notice and it does help overcome the self-publishing stigma. But it can also back fire, when someone does some digging and it looks like you’re dishonest.

The 2nd way is to embrace it. You wrote your own book AND designed the cover? Wow, cool. Go ahead and say so. As an indie author, you can do whatever you want. Although, if you take this route, you better make sure your cover is awesome. Otherwise they’ll say “it’s a shame they didn’t spring for a better cover…”

179 beautiful, interesting or creative book cover designs for inspiration

You can probably tell a lot about a book cover designer by the book covers that they like. So here are a few of my favorite book covers, in a variety of genres. These appeal to me for different reasons; some only have elements I like. If you need a book cover design that’s anything like any of these, (not exactly alike of course, just slightly similar) it’d be my pleasure to work on it.

PS) This collection is outdated; I’ve started adding my favorite covers to a Pinterest board instead, which you can find here.

 

 

 

 

Cover design secrets that sell books

If you need help, make sure to download my free guide!

I’ve helped design over 1000 book covers, including hundreds of bestsellers – download my free book to learn all the insider secrets I use to sell more books. Click here to get it now. I’ll also share some of the advanced book marketing tactics I’ve used to make a full-time income with my writing.

Tips for working with a book cover designer

I learned an interesting lesson today from Terra Harmony at http://twainwannabe.blogspot.com. Basically, Terra knew exactly what she wanted from a book cover, and told her cover designer what to do… the end result was awful; so she found another book cover designer and tried to start over with the same idea – but the new designer said “no.”

 The second cover is a product of the artist’s imagination.  I gave her all the same instructions I gave the first artist, and she plain out said, “No.” Well look at the big balls on this chick.  I tried again, giving her the simple instruction of, “Water.  Fantasy.  Go.”  And….voila.

The first cover doesn’t work – I’m not sure who the cover designer is, but I don’t blame them entirely for the result. Although I really don’t like the choice of font, if I needed to follow the same directions (central figure inside drop of water?) I may not have been able to. The second cover design is by Keary Taylor (author of the FALL OF ANGELS trilogy, and maker of some excellent covers – this being one of my favorites).

The issue at hand is complex: in general, the more specific the author’s instructions, the less likely it will be able to be done well. This is both because A) simple covers almost always outperform and B) each cover designer has their own style and skillset – they know what they’re good at and what they can make look good. If you chose a designer based on their samples, let them come up with what works.

That being said – I usually prefer to be given some direction and ideas, rather than “surprise me!”. When authors give me extremely vague directions like “it should look like a best seller” or “it should be magical/professional” I have no idea of what they really want/like. So, although I may make a very decent cover, it wasn’t what they had in mind.

The moral of the story

Have some ideas in mind, but be flexible. Nearly all of my finished covers started out as something very different. Sometimes we abandon what we’re trying to do and go in another direction.

Also, don’t settle for a “just OK” cover. There are plenty of amazing book cover designers working for peanuts. Just about every indie author should be able to afford a kick-ass cover. (If you can’t, mow some lawns or deliver papers for a month).

Finally, don’t assume you know what’s best for your book cover. Give the designer some space, and if possible get some early drafts of the cover out to your fanbase/facebook friends/network/blog and get some real reactions.

How to make your own book cover in Adobe Photoshop

If you have access to Adobe Photoshop and have time to play around, you can make a pretty amazing book cover by yourself. Making book covers is fun and – if you publish a lot of books – learning how to design your own book covers may save you a lot of money.

Here’s a short step-by-step of the book cover I just made for James Carter’s Scandalous.

1: Where to find pictures

Most book covers have some kind of photo-manipulation or collage, use one main image, or have a flat color background with a few small images. You need to find high-quality, high-resolution pictures to work with. To make sure they are copyright free, it’s usually better to look on paid stock image sites (my favorite is 123rf.com).

For Scandalous, we were looking for a Victorian-looking woman who looked broken or sad; at first we were thinking a portrait with some cracks in the face… but then I found this great picture of a statue…. very dramatic. But I wanted to bring it to life a little. So I found another picture of a woman to merge in.

 

2: Using layers and overlay

Open both images in photoshop. Make a new document that’s the right size of your book cover, and copy+paste both images into the new document. You’ll need to move them around until they fit together right – to do this you can set the transparency of the top one to %50, then use “edit: free transform” to resize or rotate it. For this picture, the eye and the mouth wouldn’t quite line up right, so I actually had to double the blonde woman layer and then delete everything except around the eye, for one, and everything except around the mouth, for the other. That way I could move each piece independently.

When things are in the right spot, you can change the blending options (lower right, under layers… or else top tab “layer”+blending options). Change from normal to “overlay”.

To get the colors and shadows to really pop out, you should download some free actions files. “Actions” are automatic series of processes – for example you can find a “300 action” that makes your picture look like the 300 movie. Or, just change the hue, saturation and contrast.

3: Photoshop Gradients

Whenever possible, I try to place text somewhere with the picture rather than in a ‘text box’, but this picture has too much variation of light and dark (unless I put the title on her face, which I didn’t want to do). So I copy+pasted a section of the background that’s the size I wanted, then went to “layer: layer styles: gradient overlay”. You can download tons of amazing gradients; so at this point you’re just trying them all, changing the orientation, colors, etc until you find what works best. It was so tough to decide here; I ended up with a bold red banner and a soft pearl one.

4: Best Fonts for Bookcovers

I’ve read a rule that a book cover shouldn’t have more than 3 fonts. That may be true (although I don’t like rules). But fonts are hugely important. Luckily you can download thousands of fonts, many of them for free. Try not to use something to messy or dirty or creative – the more unusual they are, the easier it will be for them to become overused and not cool anymore. For most books, a very simple, elegant serif or sans serif font will work best. Make sure it has a strong contrast so that it stands out. A lot of novels and literary books have very small, simple titles – that may be fine for bookstores but if you’re mostly selling online, big and bold will be easier to read.

For Scandalous I ended up using “Doulous”. My favorite other fonts include:

Serif: Perpetua, Dante, Sabon, Justus, Portland, Trajan pro

Sans Serif: Epitough, criticized, Telegrafico, Helvetica Neue, Ebrima

Once you get the size and font right, go to layers again and play with gradient options or color overlays. Sometimes you need a drop shadow to push the text out a bit, but don’t go to heavy and avoid it if you can. Plain white text on light blue is cleaner and more stylish than the same with a drop shadow (again – this is one of the areas that differ for print books; print books will be picked up and held so they can have a stylish look without worrying as much about legibility.

Before you finish, you need to kern your letters (adjust the spacing between each letter) by highlighting the letter and changing the spacing in the “characters” tab.

5: Final Touches – Eyes that Pop

I used a photoshop “teardrop” brush to place the drop – make sure you download as many photoshop brushes as you can get your hands on, you never know what you’re going to need.

To make amazing eyes that pop out, you need to use the “pen” tool to carefully outline the iris – then right click and “make selection”. Choose 4-6 feather. Then with your new layer, you can set blending option to “overlay” and layer style to “gradient overlay”. Changing the gradients will change the eye color!

Here are two of the finalists… I prefer the white/blue one – but I think we’ll use the red one instead (for an ebook, the red will grab a bit more attention and interest.)

 

 

COVER DESIGN SECRETS THAT SELL BOOKS

If you need help, make sure to download my free guide!

I’ve helped design over 1000 book covers, including hundreds of bestsellers – download my free book to learn all the insider secrets I use to sell more books. Click here to get it now. I’ll also share some of the advanced book marketing tactics I’ve used to make a full-time income with my writing.