How To Create A Book Cover
I’m lucky enough to have been involved in creating my own book covers from my first ever novel. Not many publishers give you this privilege. Now that I’ve leapt into self-publishing my latest books, the initial experience of working with artists, graphic designers and more has come in handy to create book covers that jump out at you. There are a few ways you can go about designing a cover. There’s engaging someone on Fivver to do it for you, which is a really solid option that’s also economical. You can find a professional book designer through local writer’s centres. I prefer a hybrid approach where I engage an artist to create an original work, which I then take to a graphic designer to complete with typography.
Here’s an example video of the process I went through recently with artist Stefan Koidl (and then had a freelancer on Fivver polish with better fonts and logos).
Book Cover Art Development
The video above shows one path to creating a book cover. It’s probably the most common way. The designer/artist sends your a handful of rough concepts. You then pick your favourite to develop in more detail. Then there’s tweaks, font matching and formatting to make sure the book printer can produce it without errors.
Sometimes you have a specific vision for a cover, too. If this is the case, I’ll put together a detailed brief for the designer, show them example images that are close to what I mean and begin with sketching to firm things up before moving forward with the full concept. Here’s a step-by-step process of a variant cover for Thrill Switch that Johan Åberg created.
First sketch to prove the concept. A great spot to make changes if you need them before going into full detail.
Full inks to firm up details and composition.
First colour edit. I liked this but wanted to pop out the background more and make the characters hair and tie red (as per her appearance in the actual book)
Approved colour edit. It might take some time to get here. Don’t be afraid to take your time to get it right.
Adding titles. This can also take time. I went through 3 different layouts with the cover designer before landing on this version.
So there’s a basic run down of how I work to create my own book covers in collaboration with artists and graphic designers.
The Collector’s Edition of Thrill Switch has development sketches and insights in the back matter, showing how all 3 cover variants were created. To get your hands on one, head here.