Creating Cover Art

For me, one of the greatest joys of being a self-published author is the ability to design my own covers. God has blessed me with the beautiful talent of drawing, traditionally and digitally, and I continue to feel blessed as I’m able to draw up fantastic characters and scenes that can grace the hard copies of my books.

How do I go about creating and designing a book cover? Well, it’s taken some years for me to get a basic understanding of design for covers, as it’s not something I’ve seriously studied. (I guess there’s always something new to learn!) However, through trial and error and looking at professionally published books, I’ve gotten some ideas on how to design a cover and hopefully make it eye-catching.

As a disclaimer, this post simply talks about how I create my covers, and is by no means professional advice or a step-by-step how-to. However, I hope it’s helpful for others designing book covers.

When I start a cover piece, I keep in mind the book size I plan to print in. Typically this is a 6”x9” novel format. I’ll either start or eventually make the image slightly larger than 6x9, as the printer trims the cover in the printing process.

While actually drawing the picture, I want to make sure there’s enough room for text: title, pen name, etc. I haven’t always been successful with this and have had to tweak things in the past. Most of my covers, however, I’ve managed to leave space for text while maintaining the integrity of an art piece. Let’s examine the cover for Book II of The Legacy Incarnate: Incarnate Dream as an example.

I’ve used green boxes to highlight the general placement of text, and the blue dotted line gives you an idea of the space I’ve left for trimming.

With the text, I’ve used the same font for the series title, the book title, and the pen name, with variations on size; the text on the spine is the same font too. The consistent font makes it easier on the eyes to read the titles. The Chronicles of Libera logo, of course, is a different font. I’ve set the series name under the book title in the Legacy Incarnate series, although in the Legend of Draconite series, I place the series name above the book title.

Once I’ve completed the cover design, I add the spine and back cover design to create one image. The Legacy Incarnate books include full art pieces on the back cover, where I’ve kept space for synopsis text while creating the picture. As you can see in the picture, I’ve added reference boxes. The yellow box is the general area where the publisher puts the bar code, so I have to make sure there’s nothing crucial from the picture in that area.

I calculate the spine width from the manuscript page count and the measurements the publisher gives me. They also give me the measurements for the full one-piece cover, so I can put it all together, create a pdf, and upload it. It’s crucial to get the measurements as close as possible so the printing doesn’t go awry!

When it comes to art style, I’ve used a lot of sharply contrasting themes and colors. For me, that really catches my eye. For the Legacy Incarnate books, each cover has a color theme. Book I has blue, Book II has red, and Book III has green. Book IV will have black and white, and so on and so forth. The new Legend of Draconite covers also have a sort of color theme. Some of my favorite books have had bright and contrasting colors on their covers, or a distinctive art style.

I hope you found this insight into my cover design process interesting. What are some amazing book cover designs that you’ve seen? Please comment and let me know!