How to Design the Best Book Cover in 10 Simple Steps

“Book cover design” – High a priority role in your book’s success.  

Products that look attractive and unique draw our attention. The book’s cover design will benefit about 50% of readers’ sales. We live in a world where there is cutthroat competition in every field. The exterior of the book cover design creates the first and the last impression on the potential readers. Therefore a book cover design plays a vital role in marketing the books. Most retailers lose sales because of the soft body of a book cover design. 

Traditionally, when the reader purchased books, a striking and unique book cover design was necessary to get the reader’s attention when placed on a shelf next to hundreds of other books in a stack. Authors couldn’t differentiate unless the prospective reader picked up their book or the book was displayed more appealingly. Great book cover design has always been necessary to draw the attention of retail merchandising managers if you want your book featured – and that remains true today and in the future. 

The vast majority of sales occur online, and this creates immense competition among the traditional retailing Shops. A great story must be matched by a great book cover design. The simple truth is that nearly everyone judges a book by its cover. Covers of books matter A lot. Intelligent indies know that a striking book cover design can help differentiate in a competitive and noisy marketplace, mainly when competing against traditionally published books. It’s not such an easy task to create self-published book covers by traditional publishers in this age. 

This article will teach you excellent tactics and ten simple ways to design attention-drawing books even at a low cost. 

10 Essential elements to design a charismatic book cover. 

1. A thrilling title for the book

Take any book cover; your eyes first catch the book’s title. The title should be simple and easy to remember. Clarity and directness are often as important as wit and intrigue in book titles.

2. A Vivid subtitle

Subtitles provide additional information about the book that complements the book title. It helps people to understand summary or content and ideas about books. 

3. Interesting Typography

Typography is the important part of the book cover that highlights the book title and subtitle, making them odd out. 

4. Cover design and its layout 

This is the most valuable and expensive part of the book. The book cover layout is the perfect blend of typography and imagery. It will communicate a single message you want to give to your audience. You can decide on colors, images, and font types that complement it. In the case of romances, bright pictures and happy photos are the correct way to go. 

5. Choice of colors 

Complementary and Analogous colors help convey your message clearly to the reader’s mind. The perfect blending of color allows publishers to impact customers’ minds positively. 

6. Choice of fonts 

Picking a font for your cover is essential for conveying a clear-cut message, invoking an emotion, and reinforcing the genre. Usually, the Author’s name is printed in simple fonts, and the book’s title has fancy fonts. 

7. Endorsements and reviews 

Reviews and ratings appear right alongside your book’s entry on any retailing service in the digital world. But in the case of printed books, you don’t have scores of reviews readily available. Here, checks are printed over the front and back cover as a mark of quality. These are the reviews given by prominent critics, authors, or newspapers that help sell more copies.

8. Bio of Author 

The Author’s bio is printed on the back side of the cover. The Author’s biography is about three or four sentences long and accompanied by information on where the readers can find you online, such as your blog or website address. An author biography helps you market yourself and establish a brand as an author. If you’re a fiction writer, it helps establish an author persona.

9. Spine 

The spine or backbone is cohesive with the design and theme of the entire cover. The selection of text here is particularly critical. Remember, the backbone of a book only features the title, the Author’s name, and maybe the publishing company’s logo if they go with the traditional route.

10. Mockup 

Creating Glossy mockups is used for marketing purposes. Creating a book mockup also makes the book cover more real to readers and others. 

One can turn a flat 2D image into a fantastic 3D book mockup for professional-looking advertisements for books. 

Alternatively, download free templates from Pinterest or other applications or hire someone to create a mockup for you for a lower price (like $5 or $8). 

Creating a Free Logo Design

Giving design to a book is the most important and expensive part of the production. Authors often have tight budgets for publishing books. It can be challenging to decide where to spend money and where you should tighten your belt. If you hire a design artist, it will cost you lots of money. So why not go for free logo design available in online sources and websites. 

If you have excellent skills and mastery in designing, you can surely go with the online mode of creating a free design. You can create an attractive free design online without any design experience also. You can use a free website to produce a free plan for your book. Switching online mode for free design rather than hiring artists for your book cover design can save you money and time, balance budgets, develop skills in you, become a self-dependent person, and much more. 

Here are some top 5 free design template software 

  • Designhill
  • Canva 
  • Adobe Spark
  • Desygner
  • DIY book cover 

Conclusion

Now, there are many elements that one has to add while getting a book designed. Your cover design must convey a transparent message to the audience and persist with genre expectations. Select fonts in such a way that catches all the attention of readers towards your book. Colors significantly affect every graphic design service you have availed of as they would be used uniformly throughout all visual elements.

The cover is the first thing a buyer sees and decides to buy a book. Cover design creativity is the only reason a customer picks up the book, particularly in a supermarket setting where every book is front-facing. 

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