An old adage goes that you should never judge a book by its cover but now the times are changing. If you have written a book or if you are a book publisher, you need to design a very attractive book cover for it to sell properly.
Obviously, you can hire a professional cover designer if you are a huge, multinational publication house but if you are a small time company or a writer who is self publishing his book, you would need to design your book cover yourself. Tips that follow will help you in the same.
First of all, you must study the cover of similar books. This will give you a general idea of what the cover of such books contains and what it does not contain. You must study all the elements carefully and compare various book covers with each other. At the same time, you must also check how the cover of the book relates to the actual content of the book. You should study it in terms of design and color as well as what kind of illustrations are used on the cover.
Second thing you must study very carefully before you sit to design the cover for your book is to notice where and how the title of the book and the name of the author are placed. If there is one thing in the book cover which can be qualified as its most important aspect there is no doubt that it would be the title of book and the name of the author. After all these are the things which identify your book and separate it from all other books written by hundreds of thousands of authors. In terms of these aspects, you must check the type face, type size, where exactly the title is placed on the cover, how is it balancing against the other, visual elements of the text etc.
Third thing you need to consider is the usage of colors in the cover art. The type of colors used in the cover art of your book will present its first impression of your book to the reader. You must have noticed that children's books have very bright colored covers and have large elements. This makes it easier for the children to identify the cover and bright colors attract more children to the book. Obviously, for a happy story, you should use bright colors. If you are using a thriller follow the same principle. Drab colors are generally used on technical manuals and case reports of courts of law!
With the emergence of internet, a number of book cover design samples are also available online, very easily. You may check them out and see if any of them suits you!
|