Writing advice: Make your cover sell for you

You’ve spent weeks, months, maybe even years crafting the story that now exists before you. You’ve done it. You’ve written a book.

Now you gotta make it look pretty.

Book covers are one of, if not the, most important marketing tools at your disposal. ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is only an axiom that works in metaphor for people. When it comes to actual books, the actual state of your cover will determine actual sales.

It’s not just about how great the art or how intriguing the title is, though. Your cover needs polish. If your visuals don’t look clean and meet certain buyer expectations, they aren’t going to believe that your story got the time and attention needed to be worth the time and money it takes to read. To show how much you care about the insides, you have to show you care about the outside.

So what do you need to do to make sure your creative product has the polish that matches its potential? Here are some tips that you can use whether you’re piecing the elements together yourself or your working with a cover designer and need to know what to ask for.

Study other book cover formats

As humans, our brains are wired to look for instant clues that determine quality. Maybe it goes back to that whole hunter/gatherer thing of knowing the blue berries are good and the red berries are bad. Wherever this pattern-seeking lives in our brains, it holds true. In school we had specific formatting guidelines to make our papers easy to read for our teachers. At work, reports have a certain standard that each company expects so information can be easily gleaned. At the bookstore, there are things readers want to see easily and quickly so they can decide if your book is worth picking up and opening.

Therefore, look at the other books yours will theoretically end up next to. Where and how is the title placed in relation to the author’s name? Is the current trend in your genre to have a tagline on the front or on the back? Do less-known authors’ names tend to be smaller than the title, or does it matter?

Think of it as your book joining the ‘in’ crowd. You want to dress it up so that people know your book belongs on that shelf and can hang with the big boys (or girls or theys or whoever else). Do you want to stand out? Sure. But you don’t want to stand out in the ‘wrong’ ways. Get the general vibe right, and then show how unique and intriguing your story is.

Contrast and readability

If you look at the dark romance and romantacy shelves right now in the year of our spaghetti lord 2026, you’ll notice there’s a lot of black. So much black. Black like my goth teenage self would claim my soul was. That’s no bad thing, but you’ll also notice that the books that stand out in that sea of darkness have a secondary color that pops. Red roses, blue blades, gray gentry. Something either so light it’s on the other end of the shade spectrum or so bright the black helps the image jump away from the cover.

Contrast. You need it. It’s what makes things attractive, makes people stop as they’re walking by. Contrast helps with the readability of the image and makes it interesting.

On that subject, though, there’s another element of readability that’s more literal. You cannot have an image that is so busy that it interferes with our ability to read your title and name.

Think about a time when you might have gone over to someone’s house and the first room you walk into is a mess. If you’ve known that person a long time, that’s probably not a big deal. But your reader doesn’t necessarily know you, and that mess is their first impression of you. It’s a turn-off for those who may not know anything else about you. How are you supposed to get comfortable on a couch that you’re sharing with paper plates and crumb-encrusted blankets? Likewise, why would we want to fight with a cover that is making it hard for us to read the title of? What does that say about the care and craft you put on the pages? Not much.

Make the cover readable. Use contrast, and don’t make it cluttered.

Knowledge of artistic standards

You can make your own book cover. You can save a lot of money doing it.

However, do you know what I mean when I write ‘the rule of thirds?’ Do you know how to keep a viewer’s eyes traveling around the canvas and preventing them from sliding off? Did you follow along with what I said above about contrast and clutter?

If not, don’t make your own book cover. It’s not worth the Canva subscription. Hire someone. A good cover that attracts attention and holds it is worth its weight in gold.

Pay attention to the back of your book

Just like with the front, you need to look at the back of other books in your genre. Things to look out for:

·       BUY AN ISBN WITH A BARCODE. Don’t use the free ISBNs Amazon will give you. The overwhelming majority of independent bookstores, and some larger chains, will not give you the time of day if you or your LLC are not registered as the publisher and owner of that ISBN. You can’t use that ISBN to get in with Ingram or Ingram Spark, which is where most bookstores and libraries order books from. Do not hamstring yourself. (Those of you who don’t live in the US and have those handy-dandy free ISBNs, know that I’m seething with jealousy as I mumbled unsavory platitudes to myself in the darkest corner of my house.)

·       Buy or make an author or publishing LLC logo. Penguin has their happy little mascot on the back of their books. Other authors and publishing houses leave their mark, or at least a photo of themselves. Don’t have either? Get one. There are lots of art students out there who’d love a little cash to practice their trade if you can’t afford a whole marketing package.

·       Look at the other writing besides the blurb. Do other books in your genre have taglines? Author bios? Review lines? What of those things can you throw on there?

·       Aim for full. Don’t leave a lot of ‘empty’ space on your cover. If you have a bit of art that travels over from your front cover, that counts, but don’t let it stop at some trailing background. If you don’t have art, you need words. Those words and that art needs to fit nicely around your ISBN. You don’t need clutter (remember that messy couch) but you do need purpose-full. Think composition. If you don’t have a head for it, once again, hire a designer. You can skimp on the budget for so many marketing tactics, but your cover is not one of them.

Do not use a basic font

If you’re typing out your title in Times New Roman and doing nothing with it except upping the size, you are in for a world of hurt. Plain text without some kind of effect gives the impression of a bad Photoshop job—just something slapped on the front to get the job done. Again, you either need to get some design experience or pay for some design experience. Do not settle for ‘good enough.’

Pay for a physical sample

This is a particularly important step if you are designing your cover yourself, but really, whoever does the design, get it printed. One of the things I ran into when I made my cover was that my art was bright and full of contrast on the computer screen…but when it was actually printed it came out dark and dreary and barely readable. Turns out I needed to up the brightness of my colors to a near garish degree to get the vision right in reality.

You don’t know what the printer’s machine is going to do to your work. You don’t know what’s going to end up cut off, what’s going to look blurry, what’s going to appear crooked. Get it printed before you release it. Make those changes now so that when people get your book in their hands they are wowed. One of the big tell-tale signs of an ‘unprofessional’ indie book is the elements not coming out crisp, clear, and well-spaced. Like it or not, but if a reader is questioning the precision with which you treat your cover, they are going to question your ability as a writer. Blue berries and red berries – it’s how our brains work.

It might feel unfair that your book is judged by elements that you may not have a hand in at all, let alone things that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing. And to an extent, maybe it is. But that’s not the way to think about it. Think instead about getting dressed up for a date. Is what you wear or how you style your hair or the makeup your choose really a reflection of your morals and political views and core identity traits? No. But how you dress does show how much you care. It shows you know the scene—a classy dress doesn’t belong at a punk concert, and ripped fishnets probably aren’t the way to go at a steakhouse, right? It shows you can fit in but also express yourself. You take that shower and you shine those shoes not just so you don’t look dirty but because you know you’re worth the effort. And damn it, whoever is sitting across from you or standing by your site in the mosh pit better know you’re worth the effort on their part, too.

Dress your book up. Make it feel special. Give it the time and care it deserves so people know it’s worth taking home.

~TJ Willis