Cover Concept Notes: Checklist & Guide

Getting the right cover for your book is a vital part of its creation. The cover is part of your marketing, its your reader’s first look, the immediate impression. A good cover is paramount to sales and interest. A poor cover suggests that the rest of the product is also inferior and can put readers off. So it’s absolutely vital that you get it right! First off I always advice that writers study up – check out comp titles, covers in your genre and sub-genre, current market trends etc. to establish what sort of cover you’re going to need for your book. On top of that you want to be researching cover artists – check out what styles they offer, their portfolio and testimonials to ensure you’re selecting the right person for the job.

Once you’ve got a cover artist to work with you need to be providing them with information. Often the process of creating this art goes like this: 1. Initial concepts, 2. Working on the concept selected, 3. Tweaks and changes – this can indeed involve more steps depending on the amount of refining required. The more information you can provide your artist the easier and smoother the process will be for each of you. Some cover artists will send you a concept brief to fill in, others don’t. Regardless, I believe it’s tantamount to compile your information below in order to give them all the information so that they can give you what you’re actually looking for.

Another added benefit of giving them all of the information to start with is that it might cost you less in the long run. If your artist can’t get it quite right during the initial process you may indeed have to pay more to receive more concepts or refining to reach your ultimate cover goals. I for one like to help my artist as much as possible in the beginning, she hasn’t read my book when creating the cover and as such it’s up to me to fill her in so that she can make a cover that will do the book justice. Check out the list below of what to include in a document for your cover artist, and you can also take a look at one of mine for an example!