On Book Cover Design

One of the things I’ve been working on this weekend is a cover design for an upcoming project. Trying to do as much of this process myself as I possibly can has given me an huge appreciation for book cover designers and artists.

The research phase of the design took much longer than I thought it would. I made a Pinterest board, I asked friends for recommendations, I browsed the shelves at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and my local library. This step wasn’t particularly taxing for me, but the amount of time it consumed was really unexpected. It's never good when you start off behind schedule.

Genre conventions for book covers are sometimes strange and very specific things. In point of fact, genre conventions affect the cover of your book as much, if not more than, the content of the actual book itself! I often find myself coming up with cover ideas and then dismissing them when I realize how close those ideas come to conventions that would signal a different genre to the reader than the one I’m aiming for.

The author spends so much time expanding upon every idea in a novel, weighing every word and character and beat of the work, that they are the absolute last person who should be distilling the soul of the novel down into one single image. And yet, here I am.