Our last post covered some of the basics on designing an effective book cover and this post will explore the aspects of designing a book-cover further. Here’s some inspiration for Book Cover-Design:

Book Cover-design: How to do it Right

Take Inspiration from other Books and Authors

This is one of the very first things you should do. Have a look at some of the books of other authors of the same genre and see how they have gone about designing their covers. If you’re writing a non-fiction on remedies for back pain, take time to explore other books with similar titles in the market and see how their covers are designed. Is there a picture on the cover? What sort of fonts and background image/color do the books have? Taking inspiration from other books will make you realize what you want, what you don’t, and give you a better idea on designing your book’s cover.

Know your Genre and your Approach

The approach you took in writing your book plays a vital role in deciding a cover for your book. A simple example is when you choose to give your murder-mystery a comical spin. If your murder-mystery book is not the regular serious crime-drama but a comical-whodunit, you don’t want your book’s cover to feature something serious (in black or something eerie). Tie back your cover-design with your book’s plot and approach and you’ll have a stunning cover for your book.

Come out of the Cliché

Not all horror books need to have an eerie background and murder-mysteries to feature a knife with blood dripping from it. Come out of the cliché and get creative. Think of ways you can portray your story in a different way. Also, refrain from using the clichéd a-guy-showing-thumbs up for a motivational book. Readers don’t like clichéd content, even book covers.

Run a Social Media Contest

If you’re running out of ideas for your book’s cover, run a contest on your social media page asking your readers and followers to sketch a cover for your book. Reveal the essence of your book to your readers and ask them to come up with a cover. Select, zero-in, or get inspired from the covers and reward your winner with a gift voucher or a free copy of your book. It is a good way to see different people approaching your book from different perspectives.

Wear a Different Shoe

Come out of your personality as an author, for some time, and think of yourself as the reader of your book. Think what you would like to see as a cover for your book from a reader’s perspective and reverse engineer. If you have a couple of designs, think if you, as a reader, would love to see that on a bookstore shelf and pick it up. This should help.

Besides, your designer would also come up with a lot of suggestions for your book’s cover. But, it is always good to have a good control of how your book looks and feels. It is yours. Feel free to experiment with different approaches to designing your book’s cover.