Book Covers and Jackets

Yes, people do judge a book by its cover. Create a book cover or dust jacket worthy of the words on the pages of the book. Study book cover design tutorials and illustration advice on how to prepare artwork for book covers, dust jackets, and book illustrations.

Front cover

Choose a good working title and subtitle. Do not get too wordy with the title. Keep it short. Make the subtitle as descriptive as possible without going overboard. Choose a very highly regarded member of  your books field of interest and list them for the foreword. Make sure any graphics on the cover are crisp, clean, and preferably related to the subject manner somehow otherwise make them neutral. Make sure all text is readable if overlayed onto background graphics.

Spine

This is, most often, the very first thing a potential buyer in a bookstore sees about your book. It needs to be very readable so choose a bolded sans-serif font. Make the font readable in a vertical format since people don't like to strain their necks to read book titles.

Back cover

Typically, this is where a potential buyer spends the most amount of time looking before making a decision to put your book back on the shelf or not. Even then, they only look for about 8 - 10 seconds. Your back cover really needs to be hot. Graphics here should follow the same advice I gave for the front cover although there is generally less space for large designs on the back cover as there is on the front.

Title

This is the first thing on the back cover that "grabs" a potential buyer. Do NOT repeat your title here. That is way too boring. If someone has picked the book up, they already know the title from the spine and front cover.

Sales pitch

This is basically up to a max of four lines of description of what your book is about.

Promises

Right below the sales pitch, put a bulleted list of what the reader will get from reading your book. Don't lie, of course. Make sure you are targeting your readership with these. i.e.

Endorsements

Pick two or three top names in the field of interest for your book and stick them in here. Later you'll track them down and ask them to write them for you. Much has been written about getting endorsements so I won't cover it here but keep this in mind: giving endorsements has almost as much positive effect as getting them. What that means is its free advertising for the expert who writes your endorsement so don't be afraid to ask: they're getting something out of it too.

Author

Put in a few lines, no more than four, about yourself and why you're a leading authority on the book's subject. Don't go overboard but don't sell yourself short. You're an expert in the chosen subject almost be default for writing a book about it unless you made everything up.

ISBN

Lastly, at the bottom of the back cover goes the ISBN & barcode along with the cover price. Don't worry about the ISBN and barcode, just make sure you leave enough room for it.