{"id":3817,"date":"2022-12-08T04:01:56","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T04:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qinprinting.com\/blog\/?p=3817"},"modified":"2026-01-08T16:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T08:21:16","slug":"professional-book-cover-design-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qinprinting.com\/blog\/professional-book-cover-design-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Steps to Professional Book Cover Design: A Self-Publisher's Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

If you’re self-publishing your book and designing your own cover, it’s vital to make your cover design indistinguishable from a professional job. We walk you through the seven essential steps to a professional-looking cover\u00a0design.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"professional\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Image: Book Printed by QinPrinting<\/a><\/em><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

If you’re one of the 81% of Americans<\/a> who, according to the writer, Joseph Epstein, feel that they have a book inside them, well, you’re obviously not alone. America is, after all, a country of dreamers. But if you’re one of the relatively few who’ve had the creativity, stamina, and staying power to actually get down to it and write that book, you deserve a resounding round of applause. It’s no straightforward task by any measure. The nation’s bottom drawers are stuffed to capacity with unfinished manuscripts! Manuscripts that never get close to professional book cover design<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>

But, if you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly a member of an even more exclusive group: those who have the self-confidence, the hope, and the determination to realize the dream of publishing\u200a\u2014\u200aand selling\u200a\u2014\u200atheir book. And you’ve most likely chosen the self-publishing route. It’s also likely that you’ve done a fair whack of research and found out that in order to give yourself a fighting chance in the modern marketplace, you’ll need to make sure that your self-published book is indistinguishable from any published by the “big five” publishing houses.<\/span><\/p>

If that’s the conclusion to which you’ve come, then you’re right. Many self-published authors who can afford to do so choose to outsource their book design to a professional freelance book designer. That’s a good route to go, but it’s not the only one.<\/span><\/p>

Other writers prefer to do everything themselves. Maybe that’s because they can’t afford a book designer if it’s their first book; or often, it’s because they’re deeply creative people who want to have complete control over their work; others again are autodidacts, more than happy to invest the money and time that’s needed to learn new skills.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Whatever the reason, if you’re going to design your own book cover, you have quite a steep learning curve to climb. Here, we’ll share with you our top five tips for successful, professional book cover design. We hope it will help to lower the gradient of that learning curve. Let’s dive in.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t

1. Market-based design<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Aside from the content of your book and your own artistic inclinations, your cover design should largely be guided by market demands. At least, if you want to sell your book. So, the first step in good professional book cover design is always market research.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

What that means is to look at lots of covers in your genre, focusing on the top 20 bestsellers. Make notes about whether they’re paperback or hardback, the dimensions of the books, whether they have dust jackets, the colors used, the size and placement of the title and the author’s name, and so on. You don’t want to copy the design of a pre-existing book\u200a\u2014\u200awhich would be plagiarism and potentially a breach of copyright\u200a\u2014\u200abut you’ll discover that each genre has clear, representative norms and standards by which you should abide.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t

2. Work with a custom-made template<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

If it’s your first time designing a book cover, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache by using a custom book cover template. Contrary to popular opinion, this won’t limit your creativity. The creative side is entirely up to you. What the template does is guide you through the technical needs of your design and make sure that you don’t miss out anything important, such as bleeds, margins, trim lines, and so on. At QinPrinting, we’ve developed a series of first-class design templates to help you. If you’re going to print your book with us, then we strongly recommend that you use one of our templates<\/a> as your starting point. Other templates are available!<\/span><\/p>

One of the best reasons to use our templates is precisely in order to free up your creativity by lifting some of the anxiety about getting the technical details right. A good template also helps make sure that you are following fundamental and proven design principles relating to image sizing, font size for the titles and your author’s name, location of the barcode and ISBN, and a dozen other important factors which are otherwise so easy to get wrong.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t

3. Creating cover art and selecting ready-made images<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

If you have the skills, there’s no reason you shouldn’t create your own cover art. You can either generate the artwork from scratch in a suitable program or application or you can change and adapt pre-existing photographs or illustrations to which you have purchased, or already own, the rights. Sourcing ready-made images as the basis for your cover art is a perfectly acceptable option. Many self-publishers create beautiful cover designs with no modification of the original photograph other than overlaying it with the title, author’s name, and so on. The important thing is to make sure that you don’t plagiarize or breach copyright.<\/p>

It’s a common misunderstanding that any image you find online\u200a\u2014\u200avia a Google search, for example\u200a\u2014\u200ais fair game. But nothing could be further from the truth. International copyright law automatically protects photographs, graphic designs, artwork, and indeed any other original creative work, as soon as it’s created.\u00a0<\/p>

That the creator\u200a\u2014\u200aor someone else, with or without permission\u200a\u2014\u200ahas posted the image online does not mean it is free from copyright. There are several ways that you can make sure the image you’re using is legal for commercial purposes. We’ve written in-depth about how to do this in another blog post, which you can find here<\/a>. But in short:<\/p>