A cover's job is not to be beautiful. It is to tell a browsing reader, in well under a second, what kind of book this is and whether it is for them. Covers within a genre look similar because that similarity is the message. Originality in a cover is usually a failure to communicate, dressed up as taste.
What makes a good book cover?
What each shelf is signalling
These are conventions, not rules — but breaking one costs you readers who were scanning for it. Check your cover against your own row.
| Genre | Visual signals readers scan for | The giveaway mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Memoir / life story | A single human element, often partial. Restrained type. Warm or faded palette. Subtitle doing the explaining. | A full family photo at low resolution, with three lines of centred type over it. |
| Business / leadership | Bold sans-serif, high contrast, one strong graphic idea, author name large if the name sells. | Stock photo of a handshake, a skyscraper, or an arrow going up. |
| Crime / thriller | High contrast, cold palette, a lone figure or object, heavy condensed type, author name larger than title. | Warm colours, a decorative serif, or too much visual information. |
| Romance | Illustrated character covers dominate now; clean type, warm saturated colour, clear tonal cue (funny vs emotional). | Photographic couples, which now read as dated in most sub-genres. |
| Fantasy / sci-fi | Symbol or landscape, ornate or geometric type, palette signals sub-genre precisely — grimdark and cosy are not interchangeable. | A generic dragon, or type that ignores the sub-genre's tone entirely. |
| Children's | Character-led illustration, bright and clear, title readable across a room, age band obvious from style. | An adult design sensibility. Subtlety reads as 'not for me' to a seven-year-old. |
| Poetry | Restraint. Abstract or single image, generous white space, small type. | Anything busy, or a photograph of the poet. |
The cover brief template
The one-page brief a designer actually wants: genre references, mood, what the book is about in a line, what must not appear, and the technical specs. Emailed, ready to send.
The thumbnail test is the only test that matters
Almost every buying decision now happens at about 100 pixels wide, in a grid with fifty other books, on a phone. That is the actual viewing condition, and it is nothing like the 2,000-pixel file you are admiring at full size.
Shrink your cover to the size of a postage stamp. Can you read the title? Is there one clear image, or a soup? Does it hold its own against the books either side of it?
Most self-published covers fail at exactly this size, and their authors have never once looked at them this way.
Why convention beats originality
A reader scanning a shelf or a screen is asking one question: is this for me? They answer it from colour, type and composition before they read a word. Genre conventions exist because they answer that question reliably.
A cover that ignores them is not brave; it is silent. The reader who would have loved your cosy mystery scrolls past because it looked like literary fiction.
The useful discipline: find ten books that are genuinely your competition — same sub-genre, published in the last three years, selling — and put your cover in that grid. If it looks like it belongs on a different shelf, that is data, not criticism.
The four things that mark a cover as self-published
Type that fights the image. Text placed over the busiest part of the picture, with no space held for it. Designers plan the type first; amateurs add it last.
Too many fonts, or a decorative font at small size. Two typefaces is plenty. A script face that is charming at full size becomes an unreadable smudge at thumbnail.
A stretched or low-resolution image. Print needs 300dpi at final size, and readers notice softness even when they cannot name it.
No hierarchy. Title, author, subtitle and a tagline all competing at similar weight. Something has to be biggest, and it should be whichever of the title or the author's name is doing the selling.
The spine and back are part of the cover
For print, the cover is a single wrap: back, spine, front. The spine is what a bookshop shelf and a reader's own shelf actually show, and it needs a legible title at whatever width your page count gives you — under about 130 pages there may not be room for text at all.
The back cover carries the blurb, and it is read after the front has done its job. Keep it uncluttered, get the barcode placement right for your printer, and do not let the blurb run to the edges.
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.
Generate a Cover drafts covers against your genre's actual conventions — the palette, the type weight, the composition your shelf uses — and shows them at thumbnail size, which is where the decision really happens. It is designed to give you something publishable, and to give you something concrete to react to, which is by far the fastest way to work out what you actually want.
It pairs with Back-Cover Blurb, so the front and the back are written to the same reader.
The limit, said plainly: genre cover conventions are a commercial language, and a designer who knows your shelf will sell more copies than a generated cover will. That gap is widest in romance, thriller and fantasy, where cover craft is genuinely competitive. It is narrowest in memoir, business and family history. If your book has real commercial ambition, use this to arrive at a designer with a clear brief and three references — which makes their work faster, better and often cheaper.
Draft a cover
Write the back-cover blurb
Email me the briefQuestions people ask
- How much should a book cover cost?
- £250–£800 for a bespoke design from a designer who knows your genre. £30–£150 for a premade with your title dropped in. Under £50 for bespoke work generally means a stock template.
- Can I design my own cover?
- You can, and for memoir, poetry and family history it is often fine. For romance, thriller and fantasy it is where self-published books most visibly lose to the competition.
- Does the ebook cover need to differ from print?
- Same design, different file. The ebook is front only, sized for thumbnails; print is a full wrap including spine width, which depends on your page count and paper stock — get that number from your printer before the designer starts.
- Should the author name be big?
- Only if the name sells. Debut authors give the space to the title; authors with a following do the reverse. Look at what the top ten books on your shelf do.
- How important is the subtitle?
- For non-fiction, enormous. The title can be evocative if the subtitle is literal about what the reader gets. For fiction, subtitles are usually series information and nothing else.