How to brief a cover designer
Give a designer three things: what the book is about in one sentence, six covers you'd be proud to sit beside on a shelf, and the technical specs from your printer. Do not send a sketch of your own idea. Designers solve better when they are given the problem rather than your solution.
The cover brief, in the order a designer reads it
Fill this in and you will get a better first round than most authors get in three. Tick what applies and we'll email you the formatted version.
- The book in one sentence — what it is, not what it means.
- Genre and sub-genre, precisely. 'Cosy crime' not 'crime'.
- Six comparable covers you admire, each with one line on why.
- Two covers you dislike in your genre, and why.
- Three tone words. 'Warm, understated, hopeful' beats a paragraph.
- Anything that must appear — a specific object, place or period detail.
- Anything that must not appear. Be blunt here; it saves a round.
- Title, subtitle and author name exactly as they should be set.
- Series information, if any, and whether more books will follow.
- Final trim size, page count, paper stock and spine width, from your printer.
- Formats needed: ebook JPEG, print PDF wrap, audiobook square, social crops.
- Where it will sell — Amazon thumbnail, bookshop shelf, or your own hand-selling.
- Your deadline, and the date you can give feedback by.
A separate free preview: Your free private Book Coach
A separate writing preview; it does not design, format, export, print or publish the book. A short private conversation, one question at a time. By the end you should have a clearer sense of what your book is actually about, who it is for, the shape it wants to take, and the one next thing to do. It never writes a word for you.
A separate writing preview; it does not design, format, export, print or publish the book. It asks questions and gives you your own answers back. It does not write the book. You can copy or download the finished plan straight from the page, free and with no email needed.
Give them the problem, not your solution
The single most common briefing failure is arriving with a picture in your head and asking a designer to execute it. You get what you imagined, which is rarely what sells, and you have paid a professional to be a pair of hands.
What a designer is actually for is the translation: taking this is a quiet memoir about a mother and a house in Kerry and knowing that the shelf wants restrained type, one partial human element and a faded palette.
Describe the book, the reader and the shelf. Let them propose. If their proposal is wrong, that is what the references are for.
References do more work than adjectives
'Elegant but not stuffy' means eleven different things. Six covers with one line each — this palette, this type weight, this much white space, this is the wrong tone and here's why — is unambiguous.
Use real books, recently published, in your actual sub-genre. Pinterest boards of general design are much less useful than six current competitors, because a book cover is judged against its neighbours and nothing else.
The technical specs that stop a print disaster
Before a designer can build a print cover they need your final page count, because it sets the spine width; the trim size; the paper stock, because it changes the spine width again; and your printer's template and bleed requirements.
This is why the cover comes after the interior is typeset, not before. Authors who commission a cover at 60,000 words and then cut 8,000 pay for the spine to be redone.
Ask your printer — KDP, IngramSpark, or a UK short-run printer — for their cover template before the designer starts. It takes five minutes and it is the difference between a clean file and a reprint.
Revisions: how many, and how to use them
Two to three rounds is standard within a normal fee. Agree the number in writing, and agree what counts as a round.
Use them well. Collect all your feedback into one message per round rather than sending six emails as thoughts occur. Be specific about the element, not the feeling: 'the title is competing with the figure' is actionable; 'it doesn't feel right' costs you a round.
And show each round at thumbnail size to three people who read your genre and are not related to you. Their instant reaction — what kind of book is that? — is the actual test.
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Each guide says plainly when a person does the job better than AI. Guides on legal topics are general information, not legal advice.
For briefing specifically: Generate a Cover is useful before you hire anyone. Drafting four or five covers to your genre's conventions tells you fast what you actually respond to, and gives you concrete references to hand over. Authors who arrive at a designer with three generated directions and a filled-in brief get a much better first round, because the ambiguity has already been removed.
For many books — memoir, family history, business, poetry — a generated cover is also simply publishable, and that decision is yours to make once you have seen it at thumbnail size next to the competition.
Where a designer is worth every penny: romance, thriller, fantasy and children's, where cover craft is competitive and readers are fluent in the visual language. We say so on the tool page too.
Draft a cover to react to
Write the back-cover blurb
Email me my free Book Coach linkQuestions people ask
- What do I send a cover designer?
- The brief, six reference covers, your blurb, the title and author name exactly as they should be set, and your printer's template with final page count and trim size.
- How long does a cover take?
- Two to four weeks for a bespoke cover including revisions. Good designers book two to six weeks ahead, so start the conversation before the manuscript is finished — just don't finalise the spine until the page count is.
- Should I show the designer my own sketch?
- Only if a specific object or scene must appear. Otherwise it narrows what you get, and you are paying for exactly the judgement you would be overriding.
- Who owns the cover design?
- Ask, and get it in writing. Most designers grant a licence for use on your book rather than assigning copyright, and stock imagery inside the design carries its own licence terms — including, sometimes, limits on print run.
- Do I need different files for Amazon and print?
- Yes. A front-only JPEG at roughly 1600×2560 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 of them in the original brief.