Hire a professional book designer.

Book Cover & Interior Design Fundamentals

Finding a Stock Photo

Photographs are the image type of choice for book covers these days. Quality custom illustration or expensive photo shoots are often above the budget for authors who are financing their own book and want to turn a profit. Illustrations from a non-professional will result in a homemade look.

Stock images are a great resource for self-published authors. These images can be of very high quality for a very low price. You will want to look for royalty-free images with 300dpi.

A fiction cover should appeal to the heart. What is the mood or feeling of your book? If you can pinpoint this, with a little searching, you will certainly be able to find an image that conveys that feeling. You may have better luck searching for concepts rather than things. So searching for “alone” or “lonely house” may provide you a better image than “lost cabin in the woods”. Common photographic themes that can provide mood:

• Dark Clouds.
• Shadows.
• Light Rays.
• Facial Expressions.

A non-fiction cover should appeal to the mind with a concept. A metaphor will get the buyer thinking about what the book may be about. When choosing images, download a copy of any image that you are considering and try each of your ideas on the cover design with the type to see which one is the best before you pay.

Illustrations or Engravings. Victorian engravings or botanicals can also make an intriguing cover. Most stock image sites have them.

Color is Important

There are many schools of thought out there about book cover colors. Dozens of articles have been published on how some colors influence buyers. Choosing color is an art not a science, so there is no right answer:

• Fiction covers often are warm colors, oranges, coppers, browns and reds.
• Yellow is popular right now. It has no gender association and works for both danger or optimism.
• Thrillers often utilize cool palettes with lots of contrast.
• Red and Black gives your cover a dramatic touch. Watch for readability though!
• Tans and subdued colors, when mixed with rich colors, work great for historical fiction
• Blues appeal to everyone and look great onscreen.
• Classic literature employs off-whites, greys, blacks, conservative colors.

Think Outside the Box

Often authors think the image on the front cover should be a literal interpretation of the title. It’s often better to use an image that is unexpected or the opposite of your title. A sense of mystery makes the buyer curious and interested.

Choosing the Perfect Front Cover Type

While it is tempting to choose a “fancy” face , resist this temptation. Many of these treatments absolutely guarantee an unprofessional cover design. You can’t go wrong with clean, simple readable type.

Common cover elements include:

Letterspacing. When formatting your title, you may want to use wide letterspacing if your type is going over an image. If your background image is fairly simple, you can choose a type with thinner letters. If the background image is busy, choose a heavier typeface.

You may think it is boring, but you can’t go wrong with centered type! Keep your contrast as high as possible by using pure white type over a dark image, and pure black over a light image.

Serif vs. Sans-serif. Serifs are generally used more on literary or historical book covers. Sans serifs are used often on thrillers or on non-fiction.

Book Interior Design Tips

People are often surprised to learn that the text pages of a book are "designed." For every book that attracts you in the bookstore, someone took time and effort to make the text design as beautiful and readable as possible.

Choosing a Typeface

Traditonally, typefaces for books have serifs on their letterforms. Serifs are the strokes that project from the top or bottom of the main stroke of the letter. They assist readability by keeping the reader’s eye flowing horizontally across the words. Typefaces without serifs (sans serif) are fine for headings but don’t work well for large sections of body copy.

The tone or feeling of the typeface is very important. Typefaces will exude a mood that can enhance your writing when used effectively. Font Size for most industry standard books are between 10pt and 12.5pt fonts. With the leading being no more than 1.5x the font size. Check copies of books you enjoy reading, and you will probably be surprised by the type size. A few of our favorite typefaces are below:

How to Format Your Book Like a Professional

The grammar and stylistic choices used by professional book designers may seem like an entirely different language at times. However, these designers are actually following finely curated ruleset, intended to maximize readability and flow. These simple design tips will help you navigate the subtle design choices that separate amateur design from professional.

• Book text is usually justified, spanning the width of the text column between the margins with hyphenations.
• Use only one space after periods and punctuation marks.
• The first paragraph of a chapter (or the start of any new section) should not be indented.
• Use indents at the beginning of each paragraph rather than gaps or open areas between paragraphs. Indents should be small (.25 of an inch).
• Leading is the spacing between the lines. It is a specific numeric measurement and is not the same as "doublespacing" in word-processing software. Default leading is generally 25% more than the point size of the type.
• Italics should be used for emphasis. Avoid using all-caps, underlining, or bold type.