Your book cover needs to fit your story’s genre in order to attract the right readers. The front cover tells a story. Does yours fit what you’ve written? Don’t lose readers because they don’t know what is special about your book and why they would love it.

Want to understand book cover design? Or learn how to refine your current book covers? Or maybe as an author you want to understand what your graphic designer is doing?

Some basic book cover design rules to know

A book cover, more than your text that describes your book, will be the first thing readers will notice. Here are some basic guidelines to follow:

Your book cover should fit the genre. If it’s Cozy Mystery, your cover should look like it belongs on the same shelf. The same with Epic Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Regency Romance, etc. That is why it is very important to know who your comp authors/books would be. A comp is simply an author or a book that would be comparable to your book’s plot themes.

Understand that book cover design changes constantly. To stay up on what is new, simply go to Amazon and search for your genre. It will show you what titles are selling in the top 100 of that genre.

Here’s a snapshot of book covers in today’s 100 best sellers on Amazon in the Mystery category. Do you notice anything? Book covers are all FONT BASED with little art, and colors are very bright. When the author is well-known, their name is often bigger than the book title.

Here’s a snapshot of book covers in the Romance / Historical Romance / Regency genre. Notice all feature a female in period dress on the cover. Sometimes with a partner. There is often a historical home in the background (think English mansion house), or a historic-like interior.

The closer you dive into YOUR genre, the more specific the cover design will become. This is why I didn’t show fantasy book covers. That is too broad a genre. Dig deeper and find the niche genre that matches your books the best.

This is an example of book covers under Gaslamp fantasy – the genre for the Madame Chalamet Ghost Mysteries. It’s a mixed bag because some authors are lumping their books into this category and they don’t belong. If you find this is the case for your genre, especially if it is a niche, be sure to have comps of similar books so you can go look at individual covers.

Because more books are being sold online, book covers are becoming simpler with more contrast between title/author and the background. I noticed that silhouettes on book covers are becoming super popular right now. Especially in contemporary romance.

Why are you seeing these simpler book covers?

1. The color contrast can be higher, and the appearance is less busy. This makes it easier to catch the interest of online book shoppers, even when the cover is shrunk to a thumbnail. Book covers are almost becoming graphic posters.
2. By not featuring a person on the cover, the series doesn’t need to worry about having enough model poses. If you are planning a series of 6-8-10 books and suddenly you’ve gone through what is offered for your model’s face, it can be a hassle.
3. You also don’t need to fret that your book cover model will suddenly appear on other books (not written by you), making your ‘brand’ slip away. I’ve experienced this with the covers of the Fae College series and it is why I’m re-designing them and going with illustrations. Book cover designers are all using the same online resources (Shutterstock, istockphotos, etc…) While the body and hair color can be changed with Photoshop, a face is a face.
4. Thumbnail visibility. The more details you pack into your cover, the worse it will look when made into a thumbnail, which is how most online books appear to readers shopping.

Using comps to design your book cover

There were some key things I needed to convey about my book cover for the Madame Chalamet series.

• That the book was about a woman.
• The book would be a historical mystery set in an alternate fantasy world.
• That plot would be about ghosts and have a supernatural element.

Things I did not want to promote:

• Imply the book series is horror, suspense, or scary (it is none of these).
• I chose not to put a male AND female on the cover. While there was a romance, it was slow burn.

Next, I needed to research comps – those books that would be considered in my niche genre. They needed a supernatural element and be in the fantasy genre while retaining a historical flavor of the 1890s-1910s.

Examining comps for my fantasy Gaslamp-Ghost-Mystery series that was in an alternative world similar to 1910 France, I noticed many had silhouettes with no face, or with back to the viewer, along with a city background and spooky lighting, such as these:

Elements of a book cover design

Title of the book. By using the title of Ghost Talker for the first book I immediately let the reader know this series was about the supernatural. The second book had death in the title. The other books are more puns on the supernatural and are not as clear.

Series name for the books. Amazon is cracking down on authors who put silly subtitles on their book (“the best 2023 romance book” for example) to game their search algorithm so please don’t do that. I used mine to explain what the series was about that wouldn’t be clear perhaps from the title. Madame Chalamet (it’s a series about a woman), Ghost (supernatural element) Mysteries (it’s a mystery).

Series graphic: I opted for a skull (death, supernatural) and a neon bar of light (Gaslamp changing to electric technology). Books also had the sequence number on them. Remember, if planning a series, your readers need to know upfront where the book is in the sequence (this is a huge pet peeve of mine!).

Font: I picked a font that was easy to read but had some flourishes. I could have gone more vintage, but playing with that idea, it seemed it was harder to read the title when the book was a thumbnail. Look to your comps for fonts that others are using which could work for your book.

Primary graphic: While I did use a variety of women models and Victorian silhouettes, I made them all black with no recognizable face. I also moved different heads to other bodies. While working with clipart was great, remember it will be used by other authors. I tried to change my figures a little bit and added a satchel for Elinor to carry on most of the covers.

Backgrounds: I tried to find eastern European cityscapes to play with but choices were few. I opted to obscure them with fog, haze, and other Photoshop brush effects. Whenever I could, I tried to find some city lamp posts to include as these are elements found on gaslamp books for obvious reasons.

Colors: Color plays a huge part in helping your reader recognize your genre. The gaslamp genre has a lot of black, yellows, greens, and blues.

Before and after book cover designs

I couldn’t afford a designer, so I needed to keep it simple to what I could do with Photoshop. While I am always learning new things with Photoshop, I’m not on the level of book cover designers (who well deserve their fees).

The sharp-eyed reader will notice some changes to the book covers for the Madame Chalamet Ghost Mysteries series. To enhance the book covers, I did some tweaks on the colors, figure, and backgrounds which are now all uploaded to my online book sellers.

Now that I’ve shown you what goes into designing a book cover, let me show the changes I made to the series.

Ghost Talker ebook cover design

These were the original covers published as ebooks for my Gaslamp Ghost Mysteries series. From components above I decided to go with a silhouette shape and background that would seem like something from Eastern Europe, or Old World. These actually sold the book well and while not as fancy as the ones above, they were not amateur looking.

While I did like them, I wanted something bigger and better for the print books. Nowadays, readers buy print books because they want something with pizzazz on their bookshelf. So I went with these bold colors featuring a woman in historic garb.

Designing book covers for a series

When designing a book cover for a series, I think it’s best to get all of them designed at the same time even though you may not be publishing the other books until later. This insures a consistent look across all the book editions.

Your book series should have titles that have the same “feel,” use the same font for the title and the author name, have a series number somewhere making it easy for the reader to know where that edition fits, and have an artwork style that is consistent across all the books.

Essentially, a reader should be able to look at your author page and know immediately what books go where.

You can see that on my Goodreads page that it is easy to identify the series just from book covers alone.

This is all part of my author branding and it is an important component of designing book covers that work with what readers expect and what you are offering.

What NOT to do with your book cover design

Due to copyright reasons, doing any of the following could get you in big (and expensive trouble):

• Using an image you found on the internet without purchasing the rights;
• Using AI to make it, or buy an AI made cover from an ‘artist.’ Why? Because art is being scraped from the internet by AI which then reuses it without compensation. This is resulting in a LOT of lawsuits. Do you want to be in a lawsuit? I didn’t think so.

Why is the design of your book cover so important?

When I still worked at newspapers, we all knew it would be the photograph on the front page that would catch the interest first, the title second. This is also true with your books, so choose and design wisely!

Book covers are very important because they are generally the first element that sells your book to a reader. With online shopping there could be a second for a reader to make a decision to stop and read more. If your book isn’t selling, really take a hard look at the cover first.

If design isn’t your forte, there are many talent artists out there to choose from at all price points – but PLEASE do NOT use AI! Pay back into the creative community by using real artists.

Things to check for with our book cover:

1.) What do the top 100 books in your genre look like?

2.) On those book covers what do they share? Look especially at colors, fonts, and art.

3.) What do you want your book cover to immediately tell the reader about your story?

4.) That you (or your graphic designer) use artwork and fonts you legally have the right to use for commercial purposes.

I hope these tips help you out on designing your next killer book cover design!

Need more advice for writing, publishing, or marketing your book? Check out my Writer’s Life blog posts. You can also subscribe to the blog to know when I publish another one in the Writer-help series.