Gather savvy authors together and guess what we’re going to chat about? Writing craft, publishing, our latest manuscript woes, marketing techniques, and, yes, book covers.
We asked what you wonder about when it comes to cover design, and you answered. You wanted to know about book cover strategies, tactics, and the use of AI (artificial intelligence). Even if you didn’t submit a specific question in advance, my guess is that you’ll find some helpful guidance here.
Book cover strategies
First, NINC members asked strategy questions like “How often should I refresh my covers?” Or “For contemporary romance stand-alones, would you recommend all in a similar style, or each different with focus on the individual stories, but maybe the same typeface?”
To answer these, let’s recap some fundamental principles of book covers. Consider:
- The purpose of the cover design is to invoke a promise to the reader on what they can expect on the inside. (Not necessarily literally. It could be subconsciously.)
- To accomplish this, the ideal covers should both “break through” (that is, capture attention) and convey meaning (summarize the main tension or reason a reader would want to pick up this story).
Therefore, to determine when and whether to rebrand your covers, ask yourself questions like:
- Do I have new evidence that the existing cover no longer conveys the promise of this book?
- Does my cover no longer break through in online or physical environments, for example, due to changes in reader expectations, genre norms, or other external factors?
- Do I have new insight that my readers aren’t inferring the appropriate meaning from my cover, and/or do I have a new hypothesis about a stronger tension point or benefit to highlight (e.g., I’d like to emphasize a different meaning than before)?
These clarifying questions will help you determine whether your books could benefit from a redesign and, if so, will give you direction to be able to write an inspiring brief for your designer. After all, clarity of your objective, strategy, and what you’re seeking will give your designer the best information to work with.
As you can see, there’s no one answer to “how often should I refresh my covers,” because this depends on what’s happening in the market, how outdated you feel your covers have become, and if you have other information that’s leading you to believe there’s a need to work on either your breakthrough or meaning.
Importantly, before you run out to “refresh” your covers, please consider the number one tenet when it comes to design (especially if you’ve built up a readership who recognizes your covers)…
Consistency, consistency, consistency!
Here’s an insider insight from someone who’s led multimillion- and billion-dollar brands. Even the biggest brands with huge budgets meticulously protect consistency of their visual design elements. Think about how aggressively Tiffany® Jewelry protects the exact shade of robin’s egg blue on their packaging. This is because people live busy lives and a key method to gain attention is to have consistent elements that they begin to recognize over time. It’s a lot of work and requires many impressions to build equity into those components.
That’s why it’s important for authors to:
- Maintain consistency: Strive to keep your covers and build awareness and familiarity for them over reskinning them. (Rookie brand managers often make this mistake, thinking that a packaging design change will increase sales when most times, it’ll instead confuse your loyal customers.)
- Get strategic: Think of yourself as an author brand, determine what you stand for, and which design components you’ll keep consistent to convey your most important promises (e.g. your tagline, color palette, specific visuals, etc.).
- At a minimum, preserve your author name: In case the above sounds overwhelming, here’s a pro tip: strive to keep the representation of your author name consistent across your books—font, size, orientation, placement. That’s because people see shapes and colors before they read letters and numbers. Therefore, as you build a portfolio of books, and become known to your readers, they’ll start to recognize your author name with an optical familiarity before their conscious mind processes your name itself.
Let’s come back to the writer who asked whether her books should “all use a similar style, or each different with focus on the individual stories, but maybe the same typeface?”
Remember that a cover should convey the promise of the book. So, how similar or different they are will depend on the breadth or similarity between the themes in the books. One of my friends writes in different genres, so her Christian fiction covers have a different look and feel than her erotic romance novels.
The author who asked the question stated that she writes contemporary romance. So we can assume that she’d like to help her readers easily find her next books. Some level of consistency helps them recognize visual components over time. As a starting point, the title and author font and placement can be great anchors across an author’s books. For example, observe how Colleen Hoover’s author name and title fonts use a consistent sans serif font, with a consistent placement of each:
Given these points about the importance of consistency, make sure to pause and think from a busy reader’s standpoint before changing your covers.
Book cover tactics
One writer asked about cover costs and turnaround times. They acknowledged that this is individual designer to designer so they probably won’t be surprised to hear that there’s not one answer to this question. However, some clarifying questions can be useful to ask yourself:
- How would you prioritize the importance of your cover design vs. other aspects of your book’s publication?
- How much do you value your time to not have to learn design skills and instead rely on the years of experience of good designers?
Here is how I think about these questions for my own novels. Within the genres where my books fit—women’s fiction with romantic elements, book club fiction, multicultural fiction—my conclusion is that cover design is very important. I also highly value designers’ time and expertise, and think about how much I’d like to be paid if I had that specialist training.
Bottom line is that I try to be fair and remember the adage “you get what you pay for.” For me, my focus is on being the best client I can—by thinking strategy first, providing clear and inspiring direction, and assessing design work against the brief, not against my personal taste.
Responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI)
One writer asked how designers and authors feel about the use of AI-generated images. As with any topic, there’s a range of responses. People may feel excited about the opportunities that AI technology provides, but they may also be concerned about the risks (risks of intellectual property infringement, liability, unintended output, bias, and others). I think both perspectives are appropriate and, as humans, we have the ability to hold incongruous viewpoints at the same time.
Coincidentally, my day job is governing the responsible use of AI. This field covers the ethics of AI. As a society, we should want to hold ourselves and others to appropriate ethical standards when it comes to the use of AI. What are some ways authors can do this?
- If you’re pursuing AI image generation, are you using tools that have trained their models on licensed images? (For instance, Adobe and Getty state that they do this.) This will help ensure that you’re not infringing on others’ copyrights. Just like you’d like to be paid for your writing, artists would also like to be compensated for their creative output.
- If you’re using AI in your covers, are you being transparent with readers about your use of AI? When surveyed, people state that they’d like to be notified when AI is being used. So, if you have an AI-generated cover (or parts of your writing are generated from a Large Language Model like ChatGPT), ethical standards would say that you should disclose its use. (I’m not a lawyer but from an ethical perspective, a phrase like “co-created with Generative AI” helps you be transparent in its use.) In addition, you may have seen that Amazon now requires you to declare whether or not AI has been used in the creation of the book that you’re publishing on their platform.
- GenAI models are enormous and energy intensive (for instance, an LLM search uses eight times the energy of a basic Google search). Therefore, to be efficient and sustainability-minded, I advise not using GenAI models for frivolous tasks (like a simple social media post) or tasks that are easily accomplished through other means.
This is a fast-evolving topic, so keep open-minded to continue to learn about ways to responsibly leverage AI while staying ethical in its use.
From concept to practice
Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground! Thanks for your questions, which allowed us to discuss book cover design strategies, tactics, and the number one design tenet: consistency. We even touched upon the hot topic of AI.
Now let’s put what we’ve learned into practice. What key insights or actions did you take away from this chat about book cover design? Share these with an accountability partner, jot me a note, or write down your thoughts and commitments.
What’s next? Excitingly, your book cover questions inspired a three-part series. Next month, enjoy my five principles for sparking great design. Then, for the finale, look for my article on book cover trends the month after that.
Meanwhile, please drop me a line with your observations. I’m looking forward to learning and growing on these important topics together!
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Carol Van Den Hende is the award-winning author of the Goodbye, Orchid series, which draws from her Chinese American heritage and has won 40 literary and design awards. She’s also an MBA with decades of experience in marketing, strategy, and insights who is passionate about simplifying marketing concepts into actionable steps for publishing success. She’s keynoted and presented at conferences like Writer’s Digest, IBPA, International Women’s Writing Guild, Rutgers Writers’ Conference, Sisters in Crime and Women Who Write. Carol’s mission is unlocking optimism as a writer, speaker, strategist, board member, and Climate Reality Leader. One secret to her good fortune? Her humorous hubby and twins, who prove that love really does conquer all.