Crash Course for Nonfiction Authors
Part 4: Nail Your Cover Design
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I hope you’ve had a chance to review the earlier parts of this Crash Course for Nonfiction Authors. If not, jump directly to them using the links above. Now it’s time for Part 4: Nail Your Cover Design.
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying: Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Well, throw that notion right out of your head.
Books are totally 100% judged by their covers all the time.
Think about the last time you searched for a book on Amazon. You typed in what you were looking for and a list of options came back.
A bunch of tiny little cover images, plus titles, prices, and a star rating. That’s not much to go on.
If some of the books in the search results looked like they might meet your needs, you probably clicked on them to learn more.
And a bunch of other books you probably skipped right over because something about them didn’t suggest they would meet your needs.
And that’s it, right there: You judged their covers and decided they weren’t right.
No judgment from me on this – pun intended, ha! – because it only makes sense. We can’t click on every single search result to learn more. We have to pick the most promising-looking ones.
And at this point, the cover is pretty much all we have to go on.
What does this mean for you as an author?
Your cover needs to persuade a prospective reader to click on it.
That’s it.
Once they click on it, the copy on your sales page, your endorsements, your reader reviews, and so forth can all do their jobs to get that prospective reader to click the “buy” button.
But the cover needs to get them to the point where they can see all that other information.
Here’s another important point:
Cover design is hard.
It’s not a task for your nephew who’s a graphic designer or your friend who creates marketing materials for their job. Book cover design is about so much more than expertise with the design tools, or even a good general eye for design. It’s important to understand book industry conventions and genre expectations.
There’s a real art to cover design, and it starts with nailing the concept.
I’ll share an example. For my memoir, Future Widow, these were the initial concepts the designer came up with:
I shared them on social media to get opinions. The concepts weren’t right for the type of book (a grief memoir), and the feedback was so negative it made me question why I was even writing the book in the first place.
I couldn’t help but think: If everyone hates the cover this much, will they hate my book, too? Maybe I should abandon this whole author thing?!
Followed by: I’m pretty good with Canva, maybe I can do this myself.
Yikes:
For my second book, I started with the same designer. What they came up with was truly awful. Here are a few examples:
There were more – each worse than the prior ones. I parted ways with them, called a designer who had worked on one of my clients’ books, and worked closely with him on the concept and design for my second book. Working with a pro was worth it.
If you’re curious, here are the final covers of both books:
Much better, right?
As you begin to think about your own nonfiction book cover, here are some important objectives to keep in mind. Your cover needs to:
Be appropriate for the genre
Communicate at a glance what type of book it is
Convey the right tone or vibe to attract your ideal reader
Coordinate with your existing branding, including any prior books
One simple tip to ensure your next book coordinates with your prior books: use the same font for the author name on all your books. And by all means, don’t crowd the letters on your name.
I’ve created a Cover Design Planning Guide that you can use to start thinking about your cover concepts and communicate with your designer.
Next Steps
DOWNLOAD: Cover Design Planning Guide
Up next, we have Part 5: Interior Layout for Print & e-Books. Interior layout is one of those critical details that, if you don’t get it right, makes your book look unprofessional — even if the reader can’t pinpoint exactly why.
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