Judge a book by its cover. It really just makes sense. If a publisher invested in a great cover that catches your attention, chances are much better that the story trapped in the pages will also catch your attention.

As an author, your book needs a great cover. Frankly, it’s extremely difficult (nearly impossible) to out-market a bad book cover. Believe me, I’ve tried.

I’ve worked with hundreds of authors and small presses to publish books. I’ve done a lot of different jobs, but I frequently consult on cover design. In my early days in this business, I even designed a number of covers myself.

I always recommend hiring a professional book cover designer. This isn’t a job that any old graphic designer can do. It’s a different skill set. If you’re not a designer, it’s definitely not something that you should tackle on your own using free tools on the Internet.

But even when you hire a professional, it’s still going to be up to you to provide some guidance to the designer regarding the content of the cover.

Most designers will not read your entire book and then make recommendations, that would be too big of a time investment and it would greatly increase the cost of the cover design. The designer is going to rely on you to convey the mood, genre, and important elements that you’d like included on the cover.

There are a lot of mistakes that authors and small presses make when conceptualizing their cover. Here are the top two that I see over and over again.

The #1 Mistake

The biggest mistake authors make when designing a book cover: trying to depict a scene from the book.

Stop thinking about what’s relevant to your story, and start thinking about what’s relevant to your reader.

Spoiler: your target book buyer hasn’t read your book yet.

Those elements of the scene might be really important to you, but do they mean anything to someone who hasn’t yet read the story.

That might look exactly like Mikey, and the flower shop, and the dog, and the rug is just like it was described. But your reader doesn’t know Mikey, he doesn’t know the flower shop, he doesn’t know the dog, and the rug is meaningless.

Back in 2015, I personally designed this cover for The Black Lens by Christopher Stollar. The book sold very well. This image on the cover—it never happened in the book. I don’t even think this woman looks much like the way the main character is described, and she definitely doesn’t have that tattoo. But it doesn’t have to. The book is a literary drama about human trafficking, and this cover connected with the right audience.

Readers buy books based on tropes. People who like vampire books look for covers that look like vampire books. People who like western adventure novels look for covers that look like western adventure novels.

Your job with the cover is to capture your most compelling and marketable trope. That’s what your reader can relate to. Until a reader has read the book, none of that scene imagery has any emotional value.

The #2 Mistake

The second biggest mistake is like the first: trying to fit way too much onto the cover.

Tropes sell books. Your book has a lot of tropes. You can’t fit them all.

Most books cross genres. A book is a paranormal romance mystery with a Southern gothic twist and a hint of horror. This other book is a sci-fi adventure thriller with a little bit of a steampunk vibe and a coming-of-age theme.

Very rarely does a book cleanly fit into just one genre category.

But your cover must.

You can’t capture all of those things. You have to settle into one genre category.

Years ago, way back in 2014, I published a book titled Hagridden by Samuel Snoek-Brown. Written in a dark literary style, it’s a post-apocalyptic story about two women stranded in the Louisiana bayou in the closing days of the American Civil War. All of the men have been conscripted and most are dead. The women grow increasingly paranoid of a bayou werewolf called a Rougarou. One man deserts his army unit and returns, trying to court (or maybe take advantage of) the young woman.

We could have put just about anything on this cover. A werewolf, Civil War imagery, the bayou, even a hunky guy.

Each of those choices would have sold the book to a different audience.

In the end, we chose a dark, artistic cover to appeal to high-brow readers. We felt the book would most resonate with Cormac McCarthy readers. We had to solidify the book into one specific genre to connect with readers.

Sure, this cover is super simple. But it communicates the right story to the right audience. (At least we hoped it would. This book did OK, but it’s I still believe it’s an amazing book that deserved much more.)

A good question to ask: who wants to be seen reading this book?

One audience would feel perfectly comfortable sitting at a bus stop reading a book with a werewolf on the cover. A completely different audience would feel comfortable on the same bench with a book with a hunky man on the cover.

Which audience do you want more?

So what do I do?

Instead of thinking of a scene for the book cover, think of a symbol.

What object that will catch your reader’s attention and symbolically relate to the dominant and marketable tropes of your story?

Choose one kind of book reader that you want to grab, and sell the heck out of them.

It’s not the cover’s job to sell the book. The cover needs to sell the description, the description will sell the book.

Your cover’s job is to attract enough attention for the reader to click or pick up the book. Then the book buyer will read the description or the back of the book, and that’s where the sale is made.

Once you’ve communicated your concept to your designer, hold it with a loose hand. Hire a great book cover designer, then give them permission to take your concept and apply their hard-earned experience to make it the best that it can be.

It’s virtually impossible for a designer to match exactly what you’ve imagined in your head. But if you’ve done a great job of finding the right designer for your project, even though it’s different than you expected, chances are it’s much better.

Keep the cover simple. Focus on a symbol that will sell the tropes and the genre. Then let your designer do their magic.

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What attracts you to the covers of the books that you buy? Leave a comment and tell me below.

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