🖼️ Getting the artwork

AI cover art that does not look like AI cover art

Readers have learned the tells, and nearly all of them come from shipping the first result. Here is what gives a generated cover away, and how to use the image as raw art instead of as a finished cover.

Stock images: what the license actually lets you do

Royalty-free does not mean free, and it does not mean unrestricted. Here is what the license on a stock image actually permits, which restrictions catch authors out, and what to keep on file.

Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly

Pixels are not a size, they are a supply. An image is big enough only in relation to the inches it has to fill, which is why a picture that looks perfect on a screen can come back soft from the printer.

Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself?

Both answers are right for somebody. The decision turns on your genre, your visual confidence and whether the book is one of a series — not on how much software you own.

Pairing typefaces on a cover

Most covers need one typeface, some need two, almost none need three. How to tell which you are, how to pick a second face that earns its place, and how to set both so they hold up at thumbnail size.

Color, and what each genre expects of it

Color is the first thing a reader registers and the thing authors choose most personally, which is exactly why it so often points at the wrong shelf. Here is what each genre's palette is actually doing.

Illustration or photography?

Most authors settle this by whatever art they can get hold of, when it is really a genre decision. What each medium signals, what each one costs you in rights and resolution, and the hybrid that now dominates the shelf.

Setting a long title without shrinking it

A long title is a layout problem with known solutions, and the obvious one — making the type smaller until it fits on a single line — is the only one that cannot work. Here is what to do instead.

The author photo, and where it belongs

A small element that gives a book away more often than any other. Where an author photo belongs, what separates one that works from one that does not, and the technical checks that keep it from printing badly.

Writing a cover brief, for a designer or for yourself

The brief is the document that decides whether a cover goes well. What belongs in it, the two things authors habitually get wrong, and how to give feedback on a draft without wrecking the thing you liked.

Why template covers look like template covers

A template is a layout built around a placeholder title, a placeholder image and somebody else's genre. The tells appear where your book does not match those assumptions — and every one of them is fixable.

Faces and people on covers

A figure is the most used element in commercial fiction and the most often misused. Why readers respond to faces, the three ways a face ruins a cover, and the crops designers use to get the signal without the risk.

Hand lettering and custom type

Drawing letters for one title is a different craft from choosing a typeface, and it is not what most books need. What custom lettering buys, where it is expected, and the cheaper treatment that gets most of the same effect.

Texture, grain and why flat covers look flat

A flat color field under flat type is the most common look of a self-made cover, and the fix costs nothing. What professionals add to a surface, in order of subtlety, and how print changes all of it.

One cover, many formats

Your design will be cut into five or six different shapes before anyone buys the book — wrap, front panel, ebook, square, thumbnail, social crop. Compose for that at the start and none of them hurt.

Public domain art on a cover

Museums and national libraries have released millions of images, and almost no self-published author uses them. What is available, the distinction between an old artwork and a new photograph of it, and how to crop one so it looks modern.

Objects and symbols that read at thumbnail size

At the size a reader actually sees it, a cover is a shape and two or three values. Here is which objects survive that, which ones dissolve, and how to place the one you choose.

Why your cover prints darker than it looked

The most common shock when a proof arrives. A screen makes color from light, paper from ink, and the ink range is the smaller one — so colors outside it get moved to the nearest ones that fit.

The five photo edits a cover usually needs

A cover photograph almost never arrives ready. Five edits fix most of them — crop, exposure, color, cleanup, texture — and the order you do them in matters as much as the edits themselves.

Vector and raster, and why it matters for a cover

Raster images are pixels and carry a fixed amount of detail. Vector art is instructions for drawing shapes, so it has no such limit. One distinction explains soft logos, stranded spines and most other cover-file trouble.

Art that reads across a row of spines

A set whose spines form one picture on a shelf is the most striking thing a series can do. It is also the hardest to plan, because no spine's width exists until that volume's interior is final.

Cutting out a subject and putting it somewhere else

Compositing is how a large share of commercial covers are made, and it is also the operation that most often looks fake. The tells are edges, lighting, color temperature, scale and missing shadow, in that order.

Commissioning an illustrator

An illustrator makes the picture and a designer makes the cover; they are different skills. How to find the right one, what the brief has to carry, the rights conversation authors avoid, and the files you should be handed.

Covers for poetry and short story collections

Poetry and short story collections are the hardest covers to brief, because there is no single story to illustrate. What the conventions actually are, what fails, and why these readers are less forgiving than genre readers.

Breaking a genre convention on purpose

Every convention on your shelf was once a break that paid off. The difference between a break that moves a category and one that buries a book is whether the reader can still tell what kind of book it is.

Designing a publisher mark

The small logo at the foot of a spine and on the title page is what makes a book read as published rather than printed. It is drawn at a few millimeters wide, and that single constraint decides everything about the design.

Covers in more than one script

A display typeface chosen for Latin letters usually has no coverage for another script at all, and the failure is invisible to anyone who cannot read it. What changes when a cover carries Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Han or two scripts at once.

Putting the series number on the cover

The number is three characters of type with a direct line to sales, and authors get it wrong in both directions — leaving it off entirely, or setting it so large it fights the title. Here is where it goes and how big it should be.

Covers made of nothing but type

A cover with no image is the cheapest one you can make and one of the hardest to make well. With no picture carrying the mood, every decision is typographic, and there is nothing to hide a weak one behind.

Art direction for a nonfiction cover

A nonfiction cover sells a claim, so the type leads and the image follows. What each nonfiction category expects, what works as artwork when there is no story to illustrate, and the one mistake this shelf produces over and over.

Choosing between cover concepts

You have three designs and no perspective left. This is a decision process rather than a taste contest: how to look at them, what to ask of each one, and the three traps that pick the wrong cover for you.