Jenneth Dyck is a dyslexic writer, illustrator, and designer who creates book covers professionally for indie authors and small press publishers. She is currently the senior graphic designer at Havok Publishing and resides outside of Washington D.C. She holds degrees in professional writing and digital media with a M. A. in graphic design. You can follow Jenneth’s work on her website, jennethdyck.wordpress.com, or follow her on Instagram @jennethleed_author.

Like many aspiring writers, I’m sure we’ve all been there: we love our stories, our characters—that insane plot twist in the height of the climax—and we want to see it all beyond just words on the page. In a flurry of creative inspiration, we log onto Canva, boot up Photoshop, or pull out our Crayola pencils. It’s time to make our own book cover.

With more and more authors turning to self-publishing routes as opposed to traditional, more and more authors are hiring their own cover designers (or doing it themselves). But first…how do you even find a cover designer? And what do they expect to be paid?

There are a number of great ways to hunt for a good designer, one place being on freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. These platforms help connect clients with millions of freelancers for a variety of prices, and is a great resource to get a cover quickly. The downside to freelancing platforms, however, is that they’re a bit of a gamble. Many times Fiverr or Upwork designers are new to the field or provide lackluster results, and it’s up to you to sift through the truly gifted with the less so. (For a good example of the diverse design style of Fiverr, check out Dale Robert’s YouTube video, “I Paid 5 Designers on Fiverr to Design The Same Cover.”)

Most cover designers these days regularly post their work on Facebook and Instagram. Search Instagram hashtags like “#bookcoverdesigner” or “#coverdesigner” to find accounts that are posting their work. You can also reach out to writer’s groups or cover design groups on Facebook (like the Indie Cover Project) and ask them if they have a designer they recommend. Most designers are happy to share their portfolio with you! Many designers also have their name printed on or in the books they design, so you can Google who created the cover of your favorite book.

But just how much is this going to cost? The cover is arguably the most important part about selling your book. You can have the greatest story, complex characters, and a wicked twist…but no reader will enjoy it if your cover doesn’t hook them. Even though cover designs can be pricey, it’s always worth paying for a higher quality cover, because it’ll ultimately drive more readers to check out your hard work.

Most designers can be divided into simple pricing categories, though it’ll also vary on what kind of book you’re selling. An ebook design will usually cost significantly less than a hardback with a designed dust jacket.

• $900 + is crazy expensive and typically employed by the Big Five publishers (Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan). Big publishers frequently pay around $3,000 for a cover, once you factor in photo shoots and hiring models on top of the design work.
• $500-$800 is the average price for a top-notch cover. These designers will only use the best of stock photography, and often will take their own professional photography.
• $300-$400 is a reasonable price for an author who wants a good cover on a budget. These designers may rely more on cheap or free stock photography, but still have powerful tools and skills to make your cover look like it belongs on the shelves.
• $200 or less is a biiigggg risk. They might be college students or just starting out…or they might be a scam or just plain bad. Occasionally you’ll find a great deal that still gives you professional results, but it’s truly a gamble.

Like I said, it’s worth spending a little more on a really good cover. But how can you tell if a designer is truly qualified? How can you discern between an “okay” cover and a great cover? Or, if you can’t afford to hire out the work, how can you get the most out of a design you make yourself? Luckily, there are a few key principles of cover design even non-designers can benefit from.

A design should say only one thing.

I heard this a lot in my English classes, believe it or not. From writing academic papers to short stories, we learned to focus on one major point we wanted our readers to understand. In other words, a thesis.

In design, we also use thesis statements: they’re a visual or symbolic summary of a story’s heart. The One Ring (The Lord of the Rings), the massive city of London on wheels (The Mortal Engines), the forbidden fruit (Twilight), or a literal “matchbook” (Fahrenheit 451). Whether literal or symbolic, these images tell the reader immediately what kind of read they’re getting themselves into.

Say your book features a time-traveling teenager with superpowers. She hunts down aliens and solves mysteries in the 1800s—while simultaneously eyeing the attractive space cowboy from Venus. It might be an awesome read, but including every feature on a single cover will make your audience’s heads spin. Find your central concept—or thesis—and start from there when designing.

A design should have a cohesive composition.

The final cover art of your book can be relatively complex, but it has to work together and look like a seamless image when it’s finished. If you’re designing your own cover, this step is for you. Start with choosing quality stock photography that has a commercial license (meaning you can use the image to make money). If you have a limited budget, there are a number of free sites: Pixabay, Unsplash, and Pexels are three of my favorites, respectively.

Next comes balance, which is a key to good composition. Different photos or elements have different visual “weights” that need to be arranged so the design doesn’t feel lopsided. Designers may also use something called The Rule of Thirds, where we divide an image into nine quadrants like a tic-tac-toe board. We place the most important parts of a design (such as the subject), in or near the crosshairs of the lines.

A final trick to a good composition is harmony. If you pick up any book in the store, you’ll notice that it’s predominantly one or two colors. The Lunar Chronicles books are generally purple and red. Shannon’s book Winter: White and Wicked is white and silver. You get the picture….

Photoshop has some powerful tools to manipulate colors on specific layers (such as the Color Balance adjustment). For the Canva users, however, you can choose similarly-colored stock photos and place semi-transparent color overlays on your designs to give everything a hue that ties together into a cohesive composition.

A design should have good typography.

Design is nothing without good typography. In fact, some books rely more on how the title text looks than the actual images on the cover (Turtles All The Way Down, Beautiful Creatures, Caraval). From the books you read, to the shows you watch, to the laundry label on the inside of your sweater: typography is integral to communication.

The biggest thing to keep in mind about typography is hierarchy. Hierarchy is the order in which your eyes read the text. The most important information will be the biggest and most prominent on the page, with subsequent information placed in less prominence.

Take a look at Scythe as an example. Your eyes move from the title, to the author, to the author’s New York Times credentials.

As another example, pick up any Ted Dekker novel. What do you see first? Dekker fans don’t read his books because of the gripping title; they read them because Ted Dekker wrote it. As a result, his name is going to be larger than many of his titles.

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And while hierarchy is important, understanding how fonts communicate is just as important. Imagine if the Stranger Things logo was pink with bubble letters. It wouldn’t exactly scream “terrifying monsters from a paranormal upside-down dimension,” would it?

The goal is to mix and match fonts that contrast one another. Try a fat font with a thin font, or a decorative font with a minimal font. Big fonts work well with small fonts, and Serif fonts (text with “little feet” at the bottoms of letters) work well with san serif fonts (text without the little feet). If we look at Scythe again, we see the designer (Chloë Foglia) only used two main fonts—any more than that, and you can clutter down your design. She used a big, bold, decorative font for the title, and a small, skinny, simplistic font for the author.

Imagine if she’d used the same font for the author as she did for “Scythe.” While the font is still a good font at its roots, it starts to look overused and cheapened if all the text is the same. This is why many good designers use a different font for the author, or at least, change it up a bit so it looks different.

The other important thing to keep in mind about typography (and the entire design in general) is that you want to create text that can be seen as a small thumbnail on a website. In our day and age, more people are buying books online than ever before—you want them to be able to read the title of your book from Amazon’s website. You might have a great understanding of typography or composition, but if your design is too small or too busy, it’ll be hard to read as a thumbnail.

At the end of the day, remember the golden rule of graphic design: less is more. Even though Photoshop lets you use drop shadows, strokes, glowing effects, and textures…doesn’t mean you should. Good design shouldn’t call extra attention to itself and should remain mostly invisible (you don’t want your book looking like the awkward new kid in school). But if you keep these main principles in mind, you’ll start to see good examples of design everywhere you go—and equally bad examples.

Go to the bookstore and browse your favorite genre. What one thing is the cover trying to say? Does the artwork have good composition, balance, and harmony? What about the typography?

When you’re ready to hire a cover artist for your novel, don’t just pick the cheapest designer with big promises. Look through their portfolio and put their designs to the test. Do their designs match the quality you’re looking for? Do they look like they belong on a shelf of bestsellers? Or, if you’re designing your own cover, look back at these principles to make sure your design is the best that it can be.

Let me know: what are some of your favorite book covers you’ve seen? Have you ever tried to design one of your own?