Cover design

I’ve always hated the saying, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’. How the hell else am I supposed to judge it without reading the whole thing? Book shops aren’t fond of people standing in their store reading the entire book to make a decision. Your book cover is the first opportunity to engage a potential reader and first impressions, as we know, matter. So for that reason, I’d say the old adage is a little inaccurate. Just as a terrific book may have a terrible or otherwise boring cover, a bad book may have one of the most beautiful covers on the shelf.

Luckily for me, my day job is being the creative director of my own creative agency, john+john. So I know my way around the tools to create a cover design. Of course it doesn’t guarantee success, because, like writing, all art is subjective. And designing for yourself is always hard. Can you ever be truly satisfied with your own work? At the very least, I’ve saved myself some money on doing it myself.

So, deliberately without telling you what my book is about, here is my cover design:

I give you permission to judge this book by its cover.

So, any initial thoughts? What genre do you assume this falls into? One of the tips you’ll often hear is to compare your cover art to those of other books in your genre. Written a murder mystery based in the desert? There’s plenty of books that will tell you that in an instant based on the cover. I’m aware mine doesn’t say anything about its contents. And that, for now, is a deliberate choice.

I’ll tell you this book falls into a couple of categories, but primarily it is historical fiction. There is a missing child, which puts it in the mystery genre. The child protagonist has flashbacks when she handles important objects. Does that make it paranormal or fantasy? There are scenes of war and violence, but does that make it an action thriller? No. Another tip I have heard repeatedly is to simplify your genres. My book has elements of different genres—most books do—but it is not a paranormal historical action thriller mystery. It is fiction set in the years between World War 2 and present-day 1950s. Historical fiction.

Here are some sample covers I found in my genre:

Notice the three different (very different) cover designs for The Book Thief? My favourite is the first one. Number one, because it appeals to my sense of design. It’s beautiful. Number two, because I feel it’s the closest one to capturing the energy of the book; the writing style; the unexpected whimsical playfulness of the narrator, who is, of course, Death.

As for my cover, I’m not writing a book for mass fame and fortune. I just had a story on my heart I wanted to tell and I didn’t want the cover to be a Photoshop montage of all the things that happen in the book. It doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go, but it’s how I wanted it to go.

Let me know your thoughts; positive and negative. It all helps.