Book Cover Design

Custom Book Cover Design

Searching for a book cover designer?

A professionally crafted book cover design is a key factor in how your book will be perceived. Fair or not, it's an inescapable truism in the book marketing business, and not just any graphic designer will do – for the best results you need a book cover designer that really knows the trade.

I've created hundreds of book covers, ebooks, book marketing, and promotional materials over the years for traditional publishers, print on demand, and self publishing authors. I possess the experience and expertise to create a uniquely suited book cover design for you that will capture your target market's attention.

Here are some things to consider about your book cover design:

• Establish credibility: Is the book cover design visually attractive? Is it tasteful?
• Incorporate the book's theme: Does the book cover design effectively convey the authors message and style? Will it appeal to the author's target market?
• Designed with creativity and originality: Does the book cover design create interest? Does it stand out from the crowd?

It's not just about art

I've built my business on innovative book cover design, sound marketing savvy, and great customer service. When you retain me to design your book cover, I'll carefully listen to your goals and ideas, then together we'll bring your project to fruition. Once your project is completed, you'll receive a CD containing your print-ready images for your permanent records. The entire process usually only takes two to three weeks from start to finish.

you'll receive:

• Free bar code.
• No royalties or hidden charges.
• Cover thumbnails for web and marketing.
• Up to two original book cover designs to choose from.
• Up to two rounds of corrections.
• Book cover artwork or pre press files including front, back, and spine delivered ready-to-print as digital files.

flat fee pricing

I charge a flat fee of $495.00 (US) for custom designed trade paperback book covers and $595.00 (US) for hard cover jackets, or $695.00 (US) for both. I have access to a huge royalty free image library, and use only licensed fonts so you never have to worry about copyright infringements with my book cover designs.

Custom Cover Design	Paperback	Hardcover Jacket	Both
Design fee	$495.00	$595.00	$695.00
Ready-to-print artwork
Free bar code
Website cover images
Upload digital files to printer

What I can't deliver for these prices are custom hand drawn book cover illustrations or perform a custom photo shoot - those items require an estimate which I will happily provide you upon request.

Template Designs

Paperback Book Cover Design Templates - $249!

For those wanting an inexpensive but attractive looking paperback book cover design for self-publishing through your favorite printer or publisher, I've worked up a (growing!) selection of layouts that I can quickly personalize to achieve your vision. I'm starting this service with paperback templates only, but I expect to be offering templates for hardcover jackets also in the future.

Benefits:

• Created by a professional book cover designer with year's of experience.
• No learning curve, no software - just make a few choices.
• Premium royalty-free stock image for use on your cover included* (I hate disclaimers too, but this one probably won't bother you.)
• Huge font selection.
• Sized correctly for your book's page count and trim size.
• Formatted correctly for your printer of choice.
• Fast! Usually finished within 72 hours.

How it Works:

Choose a book cover design template layout from my library that suits you (click on a cover to see full layout) and write down the template number. Note: I've downsampled the template images as much as possible (from 300 dpi to 72 dpi - then reduced image quality to 60% for jpeg export) to keep file sizes down, but they're still bandwidth intensive and there's just no getting around that while still trying to give you a fairly accurate representation of what the templates look like. Downsampling this much reduces image clarity, color saturation, and makes text appear blurred a bit - but rest assured your hi-res cover will be sharp and crisp!

This first group of cover designs feature a background image peeking out from behind a solid color or textured panel (these particular panels are textured which I feel adds adds to the overall richness and visual appeal - but you can specify a color of your own choosing and whether or not you want a textured finish: here's a link to a neat website with loads of info on color trends and palettes COLOURlovers with various layout styles for back cover text and title positioning.

This next group features a full landscape background image. While choosing your background image from my list of suppliers in the following section, you'll use "keywords" or combinations of keywords to search for pictures, such as 'denim' like I used to find the faded texture for layout 02e - which I designed to look like a well worn, home-made psalm cover I once saw. You'll notice on layout 02c I used a separate background for the back cover text box, while the text box on layout 02b uses a transparency to make the text more legible against the background ? Well, you can specify those options too if you like...yes, they're templates, but I designed them to accommodate a bit of customization within the framework of the layout.

The following group of book cover designs is a mixture of styles that incorporate author photo's - but you can use that same space for additional cover text instead if you like. Note that on layout 03a the front cover title has a special effect applied. These kind of effects are an "extra" which you can request, but incur an additional fee because they take more design work. I charge $35 per hour for modifications or alterations, but I bill in quarter hour increments. For example, the special effects I applied to the title text on 03a took me 12 minutes to do, so the charge would have been an additional $8.75 for the client. Not much all-in-all, but if you're prone to changing your mind on font's, or cover text, or other design changes - maybe you'd be better off opting for a full custom book cover design. My prices are very competitive!

This final group relies on typography, color, and structure instead of images. Check The New York Times Bestseller lists and you'll find these styles are a staple that convey a strong identity and message. Font choices and their positioning are key elements to these styles which excel at conveying professionalism.

Many of my templates will accommodate background images, so depending upon the layout you've chosen, you can further customize your book cover by choosing a licensed royalty-free stock image from my list of regular suppliers and selecting your favorite. Don't buy it! I'll supply it as part of my service. Just make note of the image ID and supplier name to include with your order. Example: Crestock, Image ID: 9923110

Please note that your image selection should be standard license "royalty free" photo's or illustrations, and not those in the "editorial" or "extended license" categories which are not included.

* The typical "standard" royalty free stock image license restricts image reproduction for books to no more than two hundred fifty thousand (250,000) copies before requiring an upgrade to an enhanced license - which isn't included in my service. But hey, if you've sold a quarter million copies of your book, you can certainly afford to shell out a few hundred bucks for a license upgrade!

Paperback Book Cover Templates
Any paperback trim size	$249.00
Ready-to-print artwork
Free bar code
Website cover images
Upload digital files to printer

Some image searching tips:

I've spent many an hour searching for just the right image to use as part of a book cover design project; clicking through page after page of photo's until my eye's go blurry. Save yourself some time by using keyword search's effectively:

Most stock image providers let you use several modifiers to narrow down your keyword searches. You can separate several terms with 'AND' to include all results for those terms.

Example: Child and Boy and Beagle and Dog

You can exclude certain results by using the modifier 'NOT'.

Example: not Puppy

You can expand a search by using the modifier 'OR'.

Example: Car and Ford and Black or Silver

You can combine phrases with modifiers to narrow results by using quotation marks.

Example: "4 door" and Car and Ford and Black or Silver from the previous example would return even more specific results.

I choose cover fonts very carefully to suit readability and genre, but you can optionally choose a specific title (and/or text) font for your cover if you prefer:

by theme: Adobe Type Library: Font Themes

Note: Please limit yourself to one text and one title font selection.

Assemble the information I'll need to complete your book cover design:

• Printer's name (IE: Lightning Source, Lulu, BookSurge, iUniverse, etc.) so I can make sure that the completed cover fits their specifications.
• Trim size (6x9, 5.5x8.5, etc)
• Page count (it must be a final page count to determine the correct spine size).
• Author photo (digital-300dpi) if you wish to include one.

Text Files: Title, subtitle if any, author bio if you wish to include one, back cover summary text (some layouts will accommodate more text than others) and reviews & endorsements (blurbs), author name (some folks use pen-names after all), ISBN and retail price (price just in barcode or also on cover?). Also include the publisher name, address, and logo if you'd like that info on the cover.

Once finished, I'll send you a link by email so that you can download your new book cover.

Cover Samples

Book Cover Design Samples

Here you'll find a general cross-section of my work. I've created book cover designs for most genres and if you'd like to see more examples in a specific style, just e-mail me your request and I'll send you some.

proven reliability

Your book cover designer should be very experienced working with a variety of publishers and book printers to insure the cover meets their specifications. With the explosive growth of print-on-demand publishing over the last several years, I have designed hundreds of covers for print-on-demand and understand its unique requirements.