Cover Art

This is just a fun lesson for the last week of class.  You don't have any assignments.  But I thought you might like to learn a bit about how to design a book cover!  Just in case you want to play around with designing covers for something you write at some point.

First, here's a video that may help you a bit as you consider your cover art.  She's talking about book publishing toward the end, but most of her info is solid for anyone wanting to make a cover, even just for fun.

Next, I'll share what I've learned from working with my graphic designer on the covers for my own books, from taking an online class on good cover art design, and from discussing these sorts of things with other indie authors. 

+ Don't use more than two fonts on the cover.  Using different fonts for the title and the author/illustrator's names is fine, but don't use more than two.

+ Your fonts should reflect the book genre somehow.  My books are westerns, so they have a western-y font.  Fantasy gets swirly letters.  Rom-coms get whimsical or handwritten-looking letters.  Sci-fi gets pointy and angular letters.  And so on!

+ It's totally fine for the author name to be almost as big as the title.  You won't have to worry about this so much, since we're not selling your book, but in real life, your author name ought to be readable at thumbnail size on a phone or tablet so people can read it while searching through websites.  Same for your title.

+ Your cover should be separated roughly into thirds from top to bottom and from left to right.  Like this:

See how each of those nine sections has a focus?  And how one of the corner spots draws your eye more than anything else?  That creates interest and makes your eye sort of move over the cover in almost a spiral, taking in the moon, traveling down the tree to the author name, then going up to the girl and on way up to the title.  Here's another example:

The arch of the dog's body naturally makes you start at the bottom with the author name, swoop up along the dog with the title, and wind up at the big orange circle of a moon.

This one is much more side-to-side, with a big middle third going one way and a skinny middle third going another that keeps you focused on the title, but still makes you go around from it to the author name and back up to the door knocker.

Last one.  Notice how all of these put the most interesting thing on the cover in one of the corners.  Not in the center.  You've got a girl with a cape and wind-blown hair in this one, the door-knocker, the dog's head, and the pensive girl, each in a corner to hold onto your interest after you're done looking at the whole thing.  Not entirely sure why this works, but it DOES, and you'll start to notice this on covers a lot now, I expect.

Thanks for being such fun writing students this semester!  If you have any questions about the course, drop them in a comment here or on any of the other posts.  I'll be leaving this blog classroom up indefinitely.