5 Elements of Best-Seller Cover Design

Creating perfect book cover art involves a combination of technical know-how and a unique, creative idea. In this complete guide to how to design a book cover, we’ll walk you through every step of the process, from common formats and cover dimensions to book cover examples that will spark your own creative cover ideas.

In this post, we’ll cover:

License this image via Roman Samborskyi.


How Do I Design a Book Cover?

If you’ve written a book, or have been commissioned to design a book cover for an author, you’ll no doubt have some ideas beginning to circulate in your head about the book cover art.

So, where to begin with how to create a book cover? Successful book cover designs combine technical knowledge with a creative idea, bringing together effective marketing with professional design.

Today, most successful book cover examples are designed to be highly memorable, eye-catching, and work just as well on a physical book shelf as on the thumbnail image for an eBook.

For book cover art you simply can’t put down, you’ll need to know your technical specifications, including book formats and book cover dimensions, as well as build a strategy for marketing your book to a particular audience.

For the latter, nailing the style and creative idea for your book cover image is absolutely crucial.


Inspirational book cover examples to fuel your own cover design ideas: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, designed by David Pearson and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, illustrated by Anna Bond.

How to Design a Book Cover: 5 Steps to Success

Whether you’re self-publishing a book or seeking out book cover examples to generate creative inspiration, it’s simple and fun to create your own book cover art with the right tips and know-how.

In this complete guide to book cover design, we’ll cover:

  1. How to Self-Publish a Book
  2. Common Book Formats: eBook, Paperback, and Hardcover
  3. Book Cover Dimensions
  4. What Program Should I Use to Design a Book Cover?
  5. Book Cover Inspiration and Cover Design Ideas

Read on to explore each design step in detail, picking up handy tips and design direction to help you start off on the right foot.


1. How to Self-Publish a Book

Self-publishing has exploded from alt-culture side hustle to big business in recent years. Thanks to breakout self-published success stories, such as E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, Amanda Hocking’s Trylle Trilogy, and H.M. Ward’s Damaged, aspiring authors no longer need to crack a publishing deal to make it big in the book world.

Supported by self-publishing platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing and Apple Books, as well as burgeoning communities of self-publish readers, it’s now possible to get your book out into the world much easier than in the past.

To self-publish a book you only need a few simple things—a complete book transcript that has been edited by a freelance editor, a book cover design, and the time and means to market the book once it’s been self-published.

Keep in mind that by self-publishing a book, you are removing the publishing house from the process, who are otherwise instrumental in organizing the publication of the book (sourcing book design, printing, and distribution), as well as marketing and promoting the book through advertising, social media campaigns, press features, and book events.

As a self-published author, you need to be prepared to take on these tasks yourself . . . or wait patiently for viral book success, which may or may not happen.

Not put off by the extra work required to market your self-published book? Awesome! Then you will need to design a book cover that really attracts potential readers’ attention.


2. Common Book Formats: eBook, Paperback, and Hardcover

Whether published or self-published, books come in a range of formats, both physical and digital. eBooks are digital books that can be read on e-reader devices, such as Kindle.

Physical books are printed as either paperback books, also known as softcover books, which have a perfect-bound ‘soft’ cover, or hardcover books, also known as hardback books, which have a rigid protective cover and sometimes an additional wraparound dust jacket cover.

Paperback books are cheaper to print and produce than hardcover books, making them the favored physical book format for self-publishers, budget-friendly books such as travel guides and airport fiction, as well as initial print runs that publishers use to ‘test’ the salability of a book.

Hardcover books are more expensive to print, tend to last longer (making them a durable favorite with libraries), and have a more prestigious association.

eBooks cost very little to produce as they do not have to be printed or physically distributed, making them a favored book format for self-published authors and readers on the go, who can travel with potentially thousands of digital books stored on a single device.

Within a typical publishing company, a book is likely to be published in all three formats—eBook, paperback, and hardcover—to reach as many potential readers as possible.

For some book genres, a particular book format may be favored more than others, in order to meet customers’ expectations.

For example, a publisher might choose to commit to a larger print run of hardcovers for a cookbook or biography title, while the paperback format might be a better fit for young adult books, fiction, or fantasy titles.

Choose between three main formats for books—eBook, softcover, and hardback. License these images via SlayStorm, Quang Ho, udovichenko, and Billion Photos.


3. Book Cover Dimensions

Once you’ve decided whether to publish your book as an eBook, paperback, or hardback, the next step in how to design a book cover is to size the book cover art correctly to match your chosen book format.

Book cover designers are experts in ensuring book jacket covers are perfectly sized, but this doesn’t mean you can’t make a book cover yourself with the right specifications in mind.

Book cover dimensions vary widely depending on the format of the book (eBook, paperback, or hardback) and the territory in which the book is being printed and distributed (note that sizes differ between the US and Europe, as well as internationally).

For example, a Royal book cover is a large hardcover size, usually sized to 234 mm x 156 mm in the UK and Europe, but an American Royal book size is a little shorter and wider, at 229 mm x 152 mm.

Some of the most common eBook and US book cover sizes are listed below:

  • eBook: 2560 pixels x 1600 pixels
  • Trade paperback: 5.5 x 8.5 inches to 6 x 9 inches
  • Hardcover book: 6 x 9 inches to 8.5 x 11 inches
  • Fiction book: 4.25 x 6.87 inches, 5.25 x 8 inches, 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 6 x 9 inches
  • Nonfiction book: 5.5 x 8.5 inches, 6 x 9 inches, 7 x 10 inches

Still confused about where to begin with book cover dimensions? A good starting point is to use a book cover design template, which can be supplied by your chosen printer or sourced online.


4. What Program Should I Use to Design a Book Cover?

How to format a book cover? Using the right design software, you’ll find that formatting and designing a book is a simple and enjoyable process, allowing you to flex your creativity and pull together imagery, typography, and color into a cohesive and beautiful cover design.

What program should I use to design a book cover? For creating a printable book cover for a softcover or hardcover book, it’s best to use print publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign.

InDesign allows you to format CMYK colors correctly for printing, as well as integrating bleed, trim, and export to PDF options that promise a professional print finish.

Wraparound book jacket covers can also be easily created using InDesign’s flexible page-sizing tools, and you can easily adjust the spine width of your cover artwork as you design.

If you’re new to using Adobe InDesign, you can brush up on basic InDesign book design skills here, and once you’ve created your cover, you can learn how to export your cover artwork to a PDF format from InDesign.

For digital eBook cover art, you have a larger range of software options to choose from, as the specifications and book cover dimensions tend to be simpler, lacking print features, such as bleed or trim.

You can create an eBook cover using Adobe Photoshop, or an online design app such as Shutterstock Create or Canva. Make sure to export your book cover image as a file type specified by the publishing platform you are using, whether a high-resolution JPEG or PDF file.


License this image via Billion Photos.

5. Book Cover Inspiration and Cover Design Ideas

Looking for book cover examples to spark your creativity? These inspirational book cover designs represent some of the most exciting trends and styles in book cover design in 2024, from bold color contrast to hand-drawn typography and vintage-inspired illustration.

In general, successful book cover designs combine carefully curated visual elements, including images, typography and color. These are pulled together into a layout, which describes the arrangement and scale of elements, such as type and images, on the cover.

Scroll down to explore each aspect of book cover design, featuring inspiring book cover examples from talented designers working in the US and Europe.

Layout

Book cover art needs to convey two key pieces of information—the book title and the author’s name. The title or author name can be the main imagery for the book cover design (see the section on typography below).

But often, book cover designers will incorporate an additional photo or illustration into the layout to convey the theme or mood of the book. 

The way that these core elements are combined, positioned, and scaled on the page comprises the layout. The layout of book cover artwork can vary widely across different cover designs. 

As book covers are not as text-heavy as some other layouts—such as posters or flyers—the book cover designer has a large amount of flexibility in how to arrange the core elements. 

One technique for layout design is by working within a grid. In this style of book cover layout, type and other elements are arranged across a structure of rows and columns.

The content won’t always be centered—it can be flushed left, right, or towards a corner—but it will always have an ordered and balanced appearance, perhaps incorporating symmetry to create an aesthetically pleasing effect. 

Example book covers featuring abstract designs

Cover for Shame is an Ocean I Swim Across by Mary Lambert, designed by Carol Ly, and for A Minor Fall by Price Ainsworth, designed by SelectBooks.

Another layout strategy for how to make a book cover is to prioritize one design element over the others. Strong, graphic images or photos can be eye-catching enough to occupy most of the layout.

In cases where the author is less well-known, this can be an excellent strategy for drawing the eye of potential new readers. 

Cover for the book The Dry Heart featuring a silhouette of a man in a business suit
Cover for The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg, designed by Pablo Delcan.

For minimal layout inspiration, look to the book jacket covers of David Drummond. His confidently sparse approach to book cover design highlights absences to create an imagined scenario—or substitutes text for a pictographic image—making his book cover art a measured exercise in deconstructed layout design. 

Covers by David Drummond featuring minimal color and art
Cover for The Crow’s Vow by Susan Briscoe and Motherhood: A Confession by Natalie Carnes, both designed by David Drummond.

Imagery

Images have been found to be six times more memorable than text, a phenomenon researchers have coined the Picture Superiority Effect. With this in mind, it’s wise to design your book cover art with a visual focus (don’t forget, the visual focus can be creative-designed typography). 

The prominence, arrangement, and nature of a book cover image is completely up to you, and it pays to be different. The more unique you can make your book cover design, the more likely it is to stand out in a sea of competitors. 

Book cover designers look to a range of different, and sometimes highly unusual, sources to find images that will give their cover an edge. A single strong photo can work beautifully in the right context, and stock libraries offer a wealth of interesting photos, illustrations, and graphics that can be used alone or combined to create completely one-of-a-kind book jacket covers.

Look at how the book covers for these three classic novels were redesigned using stock imagery alone.

Stock Imagery examples used in three different book cover designs
Stock imagery can be a great selling point in your design.

Old advertising images, vintage photos, or still-life images can make for compelling solo images, or be blended into collage designs.

There’s really no hard and fast rule for using images when you design a book cover. The key thing to keep in mind is that images should be instantly eye-catching and linger in the memory.

An image that conveys a theme or idea in an instant is a sure way of grabbing and holding a reader’s attention.  

Two book cover examples with eye-catching imagery
Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation by Elizabeth Beckwith, with cover design by Jeff Miller, and cover design for The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell, created by Henry Sene Yee.

Illustrations are also a wonderful way of expressing creative book cover ideas with more freedom and whimsy than a photo.

But, until recently, illustrated covers have been mostly dominant in children’s publishing. In the last decade we’ve finally seen a revival trend for illustrated book covers in adult fiction, particularly in the re-issue of classic hardbacks.

Illustrated book cover art also allows the integration of text and image to work together seamlessly, with the Clothbound Classics and Puffin in Bloom series, both released by Penguin Random House, being excellent examples of this. 

Illustrated cover designs featuring Little Women and Jane Eyre
Cover design for Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte designed by Megan Wilson, and cover for Little Women by Louise Alcott, from the Puffin in Bloom series illustrated by Anna Bond.

Typography

Typography refers to the arrangement and styling of text on your book cover. Since book titles and author names are the only absolutely essential items required on a cover, it’s particularly important that the typography communicates this information clearly and beautifully. 

This doesn’t mean that the typography has to shout—quietly designed type can be a beautiful support act to a more dominant image—but, in some cases, typography can and should be the main focus of a book cover design. 

This often goes beyond simply choosing a “good font.” Some book cover designers will customize fonts, create hand-drawn typefaces, or mix and match fonts to create unique, eye-catching typography.

For type-centric cover designs, the best source of inspiration has to come from British designer David Pearson. After working for Penguin Books, Pearson established his print design studio in 2007, which focuses on “typography as the principle form of expression.”

His covers explore the potential of typography as a visual substitution for images—in most of his designs, the text is the image. 

Wielding typography with confidence, Pearson is able to convey the mood of a book instantly, in most cases without the need for supporting imagery. 

Four book cover designs by David Pearson with typography as the imagery
Using a variety of woodcut and metal letterforms, these covers convey the brutal, Wild West settings of many of McCarthy’s novels. Cover designs for books by Cormac McCarthy created by David Pearson.

As with many of the book cover designs featured in this article, sometimes it takes suggestion and absence to realize truly iconic and memorable covers.

In Pearson’s redesign for 1984 by George Orwell, the blanked-out title and author name is instantly evocative of the authoritarian theme of the novel.

Cover design for 1984 by George Orwell
Cover design for 1984 by George Orwell designed by David Pearson.

In terms of how to create a book cover with striking type, you might want to use typography as a support to imagery, or alternatively direct the focus onto type alone.

In either case, type shouldn’t be an afterthought. In the literary world, after all, text is everything. Integrating type with image so that both elements feel unified is a growing trend in book cover design. 

Two examples of text accentuating the book cover layout
Cover for Lucky Us by Amy Bloom designed by Lynn Buckley, and Tin Man by Sarah Winman released by Penguin Random House Canada.

Color

Color is often the final design element considered when designing a book cover, but its importance cannot be underestimated. In fact, color meanings and psychology reveal many symbolic underpinnings to a palette.

Colors can be a signifier of genre (red and black for thrillers, powder blue for period novels), a psychological mood-setter, and means of catching a reader’s attention.

In these two cover designs for Mothers by Chris Power—which were created with different markets in mind—the symbolic power of color is at work in both cover designs.

The femininity and softness of pink is offset by unnerving concealment of oil paintings of women. 

Two alternate cover designs for the book Mothers featuring pink at the main color interest
Two alternate cover designs for Mothers by Chris Power, published by Faber & Faber.

Color can also be an effective method of unifying book covers across a series.

In the example below, designer Coralie Bickford-Smith uses a consistent monochrome palette that graduates through related color groups for her book cover examples for Penguin’s Clothbound Classics.

The result is a beautiful spectrum of color that evolves across the spines of books, creating an aesthetically pleasing display on the bookstore shelf.  

Rows of classic books featuring a discerning color palette
Cover designs for Penguin’s Clothbound Classics, created by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

While color might not always be the first thing book cover designers consider, it’s invariably often the element that makes a book cover image distinctive, setting the tone for the whole book.

A choice of crimson red across a crime thriller or a splash of sunny yellow across a summer fiction title not only indicates to the reader what genre the book is a member of, but also communicates a psychological and thematic mood they may be receptive to.


Pressing the Launch Button for Your Book Cover

In this article, we’ve looked at five ways you can create a cover that has a compelling and salable design. From focusing on structuring your layout, to choosing amazing imagery and refining your choice of color, this five-step process will help you to organize your creative process, producing a cover design you can be proud of. 


Hungry for more book design inspiration? Discover these tips, tutorials, and inspirational examples of fantastic book design:

License this cover image via Billion Photos.


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