Cover design: Should you be a sheep or go your own way?

​With my manuscript nearly complete, this past fall I started to look around for cover designers. There are many out there and it can be really hard to decide who to hire. Here are some guidelines based on my experience.

How to prepare

Before you reach out to talk to any designers, prepare the following:

1. A detailed synopsis of the manuscript. Most designers won't have time to read your book, and that’s where the synopsis comes in. Some designers offer to read the manuscript, however, that is quite expensive given the time required to read a 100K word book (around 10 hours).
2. Do your own research. You can expect your designer to have an understanding of your book’s genre and will be able to offer suggestions, however, it is unwise to go in blindly. My decisions mostly came down to what I didn’t want on my cover, because after hours spent gaping at the ‘dystopian fiction’ section on Amazon I had more than enough of men in the middle of ruins, crests or emblems, eyes, and blood drippings.
3. Look at the work of the designers you consider. This will be another time-consuming task, but crucial. The design that you get from an artist will most likely follow a pattern of previous work. If the designer’s website shows layers of stock images incorporated in the final product, that is what you will get. If you see a number of computer rendered characters, that is what you will get. This all comes down to preference, and there is no right or wrong design as long as it’s the one you want.
4. Set up meetings with a few designers and discuss the book and design options. Choose the designer whose work you like the most and who you have the best conversation with. You will be working with that person for more than 2 months.

I wanted a minimalist, simple design for my book. There were two things that made me choose the designer I did for Sābanto. Ana is a Canadian entrepreneur from Vancouver with an illustrator available on site. When reviewing her previous work I was confident that the minimalist design I was looking for would be attainable. We discussed ideas and everything was set into motion.

Feedback

I’ve joined a lot of author communities during my journey through publishing, and once I started receiving the first drafts of the design, I decided to share it for some feedback.  Here’s what I got:

1. “The genre is unclear. You need to do research.” 
   
   This one came from multiple people and took me aback a bit. I looked again at my Amazon search list. Yes, there are many dystopian covers in black and red, but there are a large number of dystopian covers that use other colors, even white and pale blue. Some of the more successful books have cover designs that offer no indication of genre. 
   
   
2. “People will pass this cover by when searching for a book.”
   
   I can’t claim to know much about the psychology of the buyer, but I know I’ve passed on many books during my searches simply because the cover looked just like the cover of the previous book I’d read, making me assume that the story would be similar and of similar quality.
   
   
3. “I can’t tell what this book is about.”
   
   Hmm, let me think … It’s about the bloody river!
   
   OK, I could have included two cities separated by the river to make it clearer, but I couldn't decide on a design. The minimalism would have been gone, and symbolism was what I wanted to focus on.
   
   
4. “Why is the author name in lowercase?”
   
   Why not? Lowercase works for me, because I want my readers to pay more attention to the story than to me.

I decided not to be a sheep when it came to cover design, and it could turn out to be a mistake on my part. I’m prepared to take the blame, but they always say that a writer needs to find their own voice and be unique, so as to stand out from the crowd. Why not treat cover design the same way?

Whenever I go back to the feedback I received, it reminds me of an image I saw not too long ago. A bookstore was re-arranging books to increase sales, and they’d put all the books with covers featuring shirtless men on display. They called these “Where is my shirt?” books. It makes me wonder how the readers of these books know which ones they’ve already read, because they all look so similar.

In a sea of dystopian fiction books with red and black covers, I hope my light-covered book will stand out. As the meme says: “In a world full of princesses, dare to be Batman!”

In conclusion, a quick note to readers: don’t judge a book by its cover. Or, maybe do, and grab the one that stands out.

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