By FCCleary & XxxSistersxxX
The cover of your book is the front door for the world in the pages behind it, the first point of contact between the reader and the story. Doors that are shabby, falling off their hinges, requiring you to navigate several crumbling concrete steps before you can reach them are less than welcoming, and the same dynamic applies to your cover.
The cover is a promise. It's a pitch for the story you're trying to tell, a sell-sheet for your world, your characters, and even you as an author. Half-hearted covers imply that you'll find the same treatment inside, and nobody wants to invest time in a story that even its author doesn't care about.
But it should be more than a simple aesthetic. Your story begins with the cover. It's igniting impressions before the reader ever reaches the prologue. It's your first chance to incite an emotional response, to trigger a sense of intrigue or wonder, which will remain with the reader as they turn page after page. There are a lot of ways to approach it - an emotional appeal, a single gripping image, a theme woven through the cover's typography. None of them are "easy" if you're intent on doing it well.
Michael Wheelan is considered one of the best fantasy illustrators in the history of the business with fifteen Hugo awards for his work. When choosing a scene for the cover of Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance, he said, "It seems as if any choice will be wrong, for having to leave something else out that calls to be presented to a potential reader. Nonetheless, a choice must be made."
This applies to all cover styles, whether minimalist, a title graphic, retro design, or full blown illustrations. That isn't meant to be a discouragement, but we'd like to set your expectations in the hopes that you won't simply settle for a couple of words at the top of a copyright-free photo that you deemed "close enough."
When I make my own covers, I tend to be more critical than I have a right to considering the ability I bring to the table. I learned how to composite graphics and I have a fair idea of what software like Photoshop can do, so when I get an idea I can ask Google how to pull it off with some certainty that an answer exists. Some compositing is relatively easy, just a few source images and a couple of font tutorials. For example:
But bear in mind that the goal isn't a pretty cover as much as it is a compelling introduction to your story. In the example above, a modern girl time travels into a historical fiction romance. The cover contains elements of each, the torn page is meant to represent her being torn out of one existence and thrust into another. (Note: the author of this book is no longer on WattPad and I've blurred out her name for privacy purposes. If you find this story in the real world tell her I said hi).
Some are more complex, but the principles are the same. I have no comments regarding the quality of these covers, only the process of creating them. Regardless of your method the purpose is the same.
We don't want to leave you hanging with that alone. The SUAW community recently collaborated on a short story titled "The Wedding Project" and it needed a cover. I'm no artist, but I spent two years at a design firm working with Hollywood films learning what constitutes good design, at least from a marketing perspective. I've also got a bit of experience working with AI which is great for processing ideas but terrible at commercial execution.
Fortunately, we have a brilliant artist chained to one of the editorial desks who can help us navigate this process.
In the beginning, we collaborated on a few ideas with mutual knowledge of the story (an imperative for any cover) and a short list of requirements from the editor:
• It was to be a wedding scene
• Bride was to be walking down the aisle, seen from the back
• All guests were to face away from the viewer (no visible faces)
Beyond that we knew it was at a resort in the Caribbean, we had a cast of characters, we had the plot and overall themes most of what we needed to have a rough go.
Since it was an option as a resource, we started by feeding some of these ideas into an AI prompt and got this.
At first you might think "wow, there's my cover," plop it into Canva, and you're off to the races. Don't do that.
First this is obviously AI which looks cheap. There are also strange mutations among the guests, the groomsmen are all bridesmaids (and there are twice too many). The image isn't an accurate depiction of the scene, and we're really not on the back of the bride, who's supposed to be the subject for specific reasons that would be spoilers if we were to share and then we'd both be in trouble and end up forced to clean the break room for the next month. This has a lot of great ideas that we can build on, but it's a long way from where it needs to be.
As a side note, AI can produce some pretty amazing images, but prompting it to get what you want is an art in itself, and even if you're experienced with it, the end result will still be mediocre because you'll have to settle for "close enough," relying on the impact of the image to fill in the bits it couldn't do for you. It's like watching a big budget movie with lots of special effects but it doesn't have any real story.
With a little fiddling we were able to change the camera angle, zoom in on the bride, and introduce some other elements from the story. The more we explored, the more we started getting let's just say the results were more creative than we hoped for.
This obviously wasn't working, but we were undeterred because we were only using AI for what it's best at - brainstorming, helping solidify ideas, giving shape to primal thoughts and ideas that we can expand on.
Since the story never specified the exact setting of the wedding, we changed tactics and brought it indoors, which suited the kind of cover we were aiming for and another aspect most people don't consider - the vertical orientation of a book.
Better. Except we don't require two brides and the aisle and building both are a bit too cramped. But now we have all of the elements together in a setting that brings attention to the bride where it belongs. After a few more tries the AI got confused again.
I'm not convinced "Intelligence" belongs in the description of whatever created this, but by now we had all of the elements. It was time to take this thing offline and put our artist to work.
With some additional AI prompts giving us a unique image of the church architecture, a solid layout for the bride and guests, and even some style elements, we could focus on things that would make the cover work as intended, fulfilling the requirements given at the beginning. Then came the hours of hard work, compositing those pieces digitally until they did the job meant for them.
Below is the final cover. If we were taking this to publishing and doing more with it then we would go back get some editing done and touch ups. But for the cover of this project it was enough and for hours of unpaid drawing and creating it's a lot to ask to keep changing for a book that isn't going too far. But it did its job. It covered the brief and was eye-catching.
This doesn't mean you have to be an artist to make a cover, it's just a peek at the process we used and the thought that went into it.
Whether you're lucky enough to have a painter in your back pocket, shell out a few thousand dollars for a masterpiece painted by a professional book cover illustrator, or do it yourself in Canva, the cover's purpose and your goal is the same. Entice your audience, set the expectations, and make a promise that your story will keep.