I talk SO MUCH about book cover design, but I thought it would be easier to just see all the important stuff in one simple book cover design checklist. So before you publish (or if you see someone’s hideous cover and want to gentle encourage them to make a better one) please share and use this graphic.
If you don’t know what fonts people hate… here are some posts on fonts
How to make a book cover design
This is a huge topic; I have tutorials that have nearly 3 million views, so you could start with those, or my free package of book cover design templates. I also have a 3D book mockup maker, and a new cover creator tool that’s pretty amazing.
You can find most of my best cover design resources here.
More Book Cover Design Resources for Authors
- Best Book Cover Software, Designers and Services
- How to Design the Best Book Cover in 8 Simple Steps
- Midjourney AI text to image book cover design art
- Custom book cover design (Creativindie)
- Book cover design templates and 3D mockups
- My favorite book cover designers
- where to find images for your cover design
- Best fonts for cover design
PS. I don’t talk about it much, but I started out as an editor, then a book cover designer. I even have a guide to book cover design you can download below, or some free templates. The first two links go over to Kindlepreneur, because his blog has excellent long-form articles. But you can *understand* why your cover matters without really being able to pull it all together yourself.
Cover Design Secrets: free guide
I’ve helped design over 1000 book covers, including hundreds of bestsellers – download my free book to learn all the insider secrets I use to sell more books. Click here to get it now. I’ll also share some of the advanced book marketing tactics I’ve used to make a full-time income with my writing.
I’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write fantasy novels to pay for my cake addiction. Sometimes I live in castles.
6 Comments
Thank you! Handy to have on the desktop instead of having browsers open. Just a quick question: How effective is having the Title running vertical instead of horizontal? I’ve seen it on a few covers of mainstream published novels and a few self-published. By effective, I mean for readability and visibility. I know we naturally read horizontal, so it puzzles me why some books go vertical.
The main reason to do that is if you have a longer title in a genre that needs big text; horizontally you’d have to make everything much smaller, so it gives you more space; I’ve also seen some books split the title word in half. It’s still pretty rare though, I’d avoid it if you can.
Thanks Derek. Personally I think vertical looks pretty awful, but that’s just me; I thought it may have been some new marketing magic I wasn’t aware of, lol. Keep up the good work, this site’s one beast of information 🙂
this is terrific. thanks!
Not bad! The first one opened my eyes 😉
Can’t wait to read Title, looks awesome. When’s it released?
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