Cover art drawn from your own project material

The strongest use is not the finished cover. It is arriving at a designer with something visual to point at, which shortens an expensive conversation considerably.

memoir. Memoir covers signal restraint: a single human element, often partial, understated type, a warm or faded palette, and a subtitle doing the explaining. The giveaway of a self-published memoir is a full family photograph at low resolution with three lines of centred type over it.

business. Business covers are bold sans-serif, high contrast, one strong graphic idea, with the author's name large only if the name sells. The giveaways are stock photographs — a handshake, a skyscraper, an arrow going up — which read as generic before a word is read.

childrens. A children's cover is character-led illustration, bright and clear, with a title legible across a room and an age band obvious from the style alone. Adult design sensibility is the failure here: subtlety reads as not for me to a seven-year-old.

fiction. Fiction is where cover conventions are most competitive and most sub-genre specific — cosy crime and grimdark fantasy are not interchangeable, and readers scan for the signals before reading a word. This is also where a human designer's advantage is largest.

graphic novel. A graphic novel cover usually comes from the interior artist, and consistency between cover and interior art is a signal readers read instantly. Where a cover is generated, the job is to arrive at a brief the artist can work from rather than to replace them.

non fiction. Non-fiction covers are carried by the title and subtitle more than by imagery, and the subtitle is doing the commercial work: it says literally what the reader gets. Over-designed non-fiction covers read as evasive.

poetry. Poetry covers are the most restrained on any shelf: abstract or a single image, generous white space, small type. The failure is a busy cover, or a photograph of the poet.

script. Scripts are rarely covered for sale, so this is either a published playtext — which follows theatre publishing conventions closely — or a title page for submission, where the correct answer is austere: title, written by, your name, contact details, nothing else.

textbook. Textbook covers are institutional rather than seductive: clear title, edition number, level and subject legible at a glance, because the buyer is scanning a reading list. Series conventions usually override individual design preference.

travel. Travel covers signal place and person together — a landscape alone reads as a guidebook, and guidebooks and travel narrative sell to different readers. The subtitle usually carries the journey; the image carries the place.

Draws on the manuscript in your account, whatever its origin. Works just as well for a book you uploaded finished as for one written here from scratch.

A book cover is not decoration, it is a signal. Readers scanning a shelf or a thumbnail decide in under a second what kind of book they are looking at, and they decide from conventions they could not articulate but read fluently — typeface, colour, how much of the frame the title takes, whether there is a figure and whether that figure faces you.

Authors design covers they personally find beautiful and are then puzzled that nobody picks the book up. The cover is not for you. It is a promise to a specific reader that this is the kind of book they already like.

A designer who knows your shelf will sell more copies than a generated cover. That gap is widest in romance, thriller and fantasy, where cover conventions are a precise commercial language. If the book is going to market seriously, hire someone — and hand them this as the brief.