Book Cover Design

Your book deserves the best possible shot at success. A well-designed front and back book cover will greatly increase your chances of targeting your readers and achieving positive sales results.

On average, most readers will only spend a few seconds glancing at your book either online or in a ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshop.  Therefore, you need to be able to quickly convince them to buy your book via an eye-catching cover design. Attracting attention and generating excitement are the main objectives for any professional-looking book cover.

Key Cover Design Principles

The main purpose of the cover isn’t to tell readers exactly what your book is about; it’s simply to entice them to want to pick up or click on the book and then read the blurb on the back to find out more.

An important principle to consider in relation to book cover design is that non-fiction covers should appeal to your reader’s brain while fiction covers should appeal to their heart. Furthermore, in the case of fiction books, an effective cover design should use genre conventions so that readers can tell at a glance exactly what genre it fits into. If you try to create a unique cover for your book, readers won’t be able to discern whether it’s something they might like to read or not.

Book Cover Design Process

At Brisbane Self Publishing Service our book cover design process encompasses four stages:

1. INITIAL CONSULTATION

What is the key idea that you want readers to glean from your book’s cover? First up, we consult with you to develop an in-depth understanding of your book’s genre/theme before launching into the cover design process. We can also advise you about image selection for the front cover and then purchase a high-resolution, royalty-free photo/illustration from an image library on your behalf. Finally, we can assist you with either copywriting or editing your back cover blurb and author bio.

2. DESIGN

Following on from the initial briefing, we’ll send you several different design versions for your book’s cover. All stock images or artwork we use are high resolution and have copyright-clearance. We also carefully consider the font style that is used for front cover text (i.e. book title, author name, subtitle if relevant). For example, flowery script-style fonts are well suited to romance and chicklit genres, while solid block typefaces tend to suit mystery/thrillers or crime novels.

3. REVISION

Great design is always a two-way collaborative process between the designer and client. In response to your feedback to our initial drafts, we’ll rework your book cover design. We provide you with several revisions of your selected design to ensure you’re happy with the final result.

4. APPROVAL

Once you’ve authorised the completed design, we’ll deliver the final book cover design to you as a press-ready PDF file. The finished cover design can be adapted for all ebook and print book formats.

Book Cover Design – Client case study

You can read a detailed description of how we created an attractive cover design for an author in the following case study blog post: Analysis of the book cover design process: Client case study

Book cover designs we’ve created for our author clients

For examples of cover designs we’ve created for fiction, non-fcition, memoir and children’s books, check out our client portfolio on Our Authors page.

Fee range for cover design projects

Our fee for cover design projects (which includes creating the front and back covers, plus calculating the correct spine width for printing) ranges between $250—$950. This fee is dependent on your book’s genre and complexity of your overall design concept.

Click on the blue button below to check out our book cover design packages: