How To Design Your Book Cover - A Guide

 In all likeliness if you are in the stage of designing your book cover you have at least completed the first draft of your novel. But fear not! Creatives do not think in the same order; for, great minds do not think alike. You could be postulating your book cover from the very beginning, in the middle of your writing process or anywhere in between. But what if you are not a visual artist? You may think it impossible to design a cover from your own mind. Today on The Fabler's Quill we will go over two methods to design a perfect cover for your novel without requiring artistic skill. 

Method 1: Create a Rough Draft and Hire An Artist

Above is the cover for my first novel. I have never been the sort to understand visual art and how to create it. However, I always had ideas of what I wanted to create. The first step was to look for inspiration. I perused my mom's bookshelf to find what really stuck out. After enough searching I found an edition of We The Living by the controversial author Ayn Rand. Below is the edition I found.

I am certain that you can see the similarities. 

Once I saw the cover, it brought to mind a pivotal scene in my novel. One that takes place amongst a complex of buildings in Dallas, Texas during a dark day. I reread the scene to remind myself of the imagery and then created the alpha version of my cover listed below.

While I did design the alpha and beta versions of my novel's cover, it is clear that visual art is not my strong suit. Located within the alpha version most of the elements seen in the final version can be spotted. The general layout is the same, the text placement, the characters, the helipad, and the air-conditioner systems on top of the buildings. But how did my childish mock up get turned in the quality book cover of today?

Being fully aware of my artistic qualities I needed someone else to touch up my design to make it presentable. I contacted a friend who would go on to win awards for her art: Autumn Potter. Ms. Potter was and is a true creative genius of our time and an old friend of mine. I hired her to create the final version of my cover, but before I could do that I needed to make a proposal that detailed my creative vision. I thus created a cover proposal that detailed exactly what I wanted from the final version. Within the proposal contained the beta version of the cover. Admittedly, I created it in Microsoft Paint.

The beta version while even uglier contained more detail than its alpha counterpart. The texture of the buildings, the addition of a car, and how the characters were to be presented. Once the proposal was sent I waited patiently until Ms. Potter finished her major touch-up. 

Without any artistic skill and with the contribution of an artist, I was able to create my own cover that matched my vision perfectly and even more. Ms. Potter added the detail of the streetlights from the inspiration and it was brilliant. To summarize Method 1 you first find inspiration, conceive of an idea and make a rough version, create a proposal, and hire an artist to make the needed touch-ups from websites like Fiverr. But this is a method that in most circumstances requires money. The next method requires no purchases for those who cannot afford assistance. 

Method 2: Use Online Resources

Sympathy For The Savage Edition 2 - Hardcover was released on July 24th, 2023. With a new edition came time to create a new cover. This time I did not want to rely on an artist to finalize my cover and wanted to make something completely on my own. In order to do so, I went to one of many online cover creators. The one I chose was Amazon's Cover Creator and went from there. However, there are many free websites that offers these services. Other quality ones included Canva, Ingramspark, and Adobe. A simple Google search will yield dozens of cover creators websites that will help you design the perfect image to slap on your book.

There is a limitation to these cover creator websites, however. While easy and fun to use, they sometimes can lack the option to be creative. If you find yourself dissatisfied with what these sites offer head yourself over to A.I. generation. Using A.I, you can specify an original quality book cover that you can change and touch-up all you like.

I hope one of these methods is helpful to your cover-art needs. Feel free to reach out to me for further details on cover creation. 

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