A bespoke book cover costs £250–£800 from a designer who knows your genre, and £30–£150 for a premade with your title dropped in. It is the highest-leverage purchase in self-publishing, because nothing downstream compensates for a cover that signals the wrong shelf.
What it costs
What cover design costs — and what you're actually buying
What good looks like
- Three concepts, not one
- Thumbnail tests — most covers are first seen at 200 pixels
- Genre conventions understood and either used or broken on purpose
- Print and ebook versions, with the spine calculated for your page count
What your book will actually cost
Four questions — genre, length, what you have already, what you want at the end — and we send a costed plan for your book.
What you are actually buying
A cover is a promise to a specific reader that this is the kind of book they already like. It is read in under a second, from conventions the reader could not articulate but understands fluently — typeface, colour, how much of the frame the title takes, whether there is a figure and whether that figure faces you.
Why it costs that
A bespoke cover is a designer's time plus stock or commissioned imagery plus the licence attached to it. £250–£800 buys a designer who knows your shelf, two to three revision rounds, and files in every format you need. Premades at £30–£150 are pre-designed templates with your title dropped in — good value where the design genuinely suits, and visibly generic where it does not.
How to spend less
Get the brief right before you commission, because revision rounds are where budgets go. Six reference covers with one line each, your final page count and trim size from the printer, and a clear statement of what must not appear will get you a better first round than most authors get in three. For memoir, family history and local interest, a premade or a generated cover is often genuinely sufficient.
What good looks like
- Three concepts, not one
- Thumbnail tests — most covers are first seen at 200 pixels
- Genre conventions understood and either used or broken on purpose
- Print and ebook versions, with the spine calculated for your page count
Questions to ask them
- Can I see covers you've done in my genre?
- How many revisions are included?
- Do I get the source files?
- What happens if my page count changes?
Red flags
- A portfolio with no books in your genre
- Stock imagery you can find on the first page of a search
- No thumbnail test
- Unwillingness to hand over source files
Honestly
A designer who knows your shelf will sell more copies than anything generated, and the gap is widest in romance, thriller and fantasy where conventions are strictest. For a family memoir printed for forty people, that gap barely matters.
What Your Book Pro does here
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
These prices are here to be used, not to sell you something — brief a freelancer with them, sanity-check a quote, or work out what you actually need. Where Your Book Pro changes the arithmetic, the page says so; where it does not, it says that too.
A designer who knows your shelf will sell more copies than anything generated, and the gap is widest in romance, thriller and fantasy where conventions are strictest. For a family memoir printed for forty people, that gap barely matters.
What it costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DIY with templates | £0 | Free tools |
| Professional custom cover | £250–£500 | UK market |
| Bespoke illustrated cover | £500–£800+ | UK market |
CIEP suggested minimum rates effective 1 March 2026; Books.by; publishing.co.uk; The Ghostwriters Agency. Dated 9 September 2026.
Draft a cover
Get my costed planQuestions people ask
- How much should a book cover cost?
- £250–£800 bespoke from a designer who knows your genre; £30–£150 for a premade. Under £50 for bespoke work generally means a stock template.
- Why do I need the page count first?
- It sets the spine width for the print wrap. Commissioning a cover before the interior is final means paying to have the spine redone.
- Do I own the cover design?
- Ask, and get it in writing. Most designers licence rather than assign, and stock imagery inside the design carries its own terms.
- How many formats do I need?
- A front-only JPEG for the ebook, a full-wrap PDF at your printer's spec for print, and a square version if you plan an audiobook. Ask for all three in the brief.