How to make your book cover stand out?

There is a saying that ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. But unfortunately, we all do that and not just with people, with actual books too. Whether you are publishing a physical book or an ebook, you need to make sure that the cover of your book is appealing, interesting, and unique.

A book cover needs to be outstanding, and high in quality if you want to increase your sales. People get appealed by two things when they are looking at books, especially of newcomers- a book cover and the description that is written at the back of the book, which is part of the cover.

In this blog, we will explore some simple ways and tips that can help you make your book cover stand out.

Tips: 

Know your title

The first thing you need to do is find a good book title if you haven’t already. You cannot design your book cover if you are not aware of your title. You must have your book title handy, otherwise designing the right cover will be a problem. Your book title and the cover has to be in sync.

Keep the cover simple

The book cover doesn’t have to be over-dramatic, but it needs to be impactful. A person looking at books will only give a few seconds to the book whether it is a paperback or a thumbnail on the screen. So, make sure you impress the customer with your book cover in that few seconds. 

Keep it simple by picking one or two elements from the story and make the cover according to that. The title describes the book and sends out a message- like this book has romance or thriller and so on. So, keeping all these things in mind, start creating a layout of your book.

Stick to your genre’s expectations

There are so many book genres, and every book genre has different expectations when it comes to the book cover. So, look online on Amazon or Google at book covers of the genre that you have written your book in.

Note the color theme and font that most books in that genre has and take inspiration from them. You can take inspiration from other books too, but make sure you don’t copy anyone else’s work.

Moreover, you can inspiration from Pinterest too. There are so many ideas here, you can make a board and pin these ideas here. Then, use them as a reference later while designing your book cover.

The cover should connect with the reader’s emotions

A reader looking at the cover of your book should feel connected with it emotionally. And that can happen only when you design the cover keeping in mind its genre. If it is a romantic book, the cover should make the person feel loved. If it’s thriller, the cover can have a dark color and a half-hidden face, which makes a person feel scared or get an adrenaline rush. You need the cover to connect with the reader’s emotions to make sure they pick your book amongst the sea of other books.

Don’t focus too much on minute details

If you don’t want to disappoint your readers, make sure you don’t get hung up on specific character details while designing your book cover. For instance, if one of your character in the book has red hair, and blue eyes and an innocent face, but is manipulative, don’t use all these details to design the cover. You can take the silhouette of the face or show red hair, but nothing more. Why? Well, because when you give specific details, people look for that in the book and if they don’t find it exactly like that, they are disappointed. Like when I watched harry potter, I was disappointed because the books were so great, but the movies couldn’t do justice to a lot of characters.

Find a great tool if you want to design the cover yourself

If you are self-publishing your book, you need to design the cover yourself too. So, here are some tools that you can use to do that:

• • Canva: One of the best tools that are both free and paid. It has a lot of features and templates for you to design your book cover. Also, the library has thousands of icons and illustrations and images that you can use without worrying about copyright issues.
  • Adobe: If you are a professional, you can use Adobe Insight or Premier to design your book cover.

You can also hire a professional designer if you don’t know much about designing covers. Here are some sites that can help you:

• • 99 designs, 100 covers, eBook launch, and so on.

Think about readers while designing the cover

You read books too, so you know the feeling you have when you look at a book cover which is not great, but the book is quite beautiful. So, step into the shoes of your reader, and try to design a cover that you will love or want to pick up as a reader. Of course, you cannot please everyone, but you need to target the maximum people.

I hope these tips will help you in designing a compelling and justified book cover.