How to Design an Award-Winning Book Cover

Designing effective book covers, to the frustration of publishers everywhere, is more an art than a science. Fortunately, a few loose guidelines apply.

Betsy Kulamer, Vice President of Washington Book Publishers, reports that WBP used the following criteria for selecting the winners of the WBP 2008 Book Design and Effectiveness Awards. To see images of the winners, go to WBP’s website.

An effective cover should:

• represent the book’s contents. This means not just its subject matter, but its tone: see, for example, our earlier entry about a WBP award-winning cover designed by Dan Kohan.
• appeal to the book’s intended audience. This means, of course, knowing what a book’s core audience is, while at the same time allowing for potential expansion of that audience.
• be aesthetically appealing. Even readers who think they have no interest in the material should be drawn to the book.

These interrelated criteria are a fine place to start when designing or sizing up a book. But what do they entail on a more concrete level?

The 12.5 Percent Rule. Kulamer says the judges for the WBP Awards often apply the “12.5 Percent Rule”: scan the cover of a book and, in a PDF, reduce its size to 12.5%. If it looks like mush, the cover is probably not doing its job. This is especially important in the Amazon era, when many readers first encounter the cover in a miniature version on the Internet. The three different regions of text on the cover—title, subtitle, and author—should be discernible at a glance, and the images should enhance the text’s readability rather than interfere with it. Less, as is so often the case, is more.

Keep it readable. One way to make a book stand out from its competitors is to use a funky or obscure typeface. Unfortunately, such an approach tends to lessen a book’s visual impact rather than heighten it. Kulamer recommends using a clean, readable font, so that consumers can jump immediately from the letters on the page to the concept behind those letters. Probably best to stay away from Wingdings and its cousins.

Pay attention to the whole package. One often-neglected aspect of a book cover is its spine. This is what people see if they are browsing the shelves in a bookstore or library, and the impact it makes is important. Here, again, the emphasis should be on clarity and legibility. Kulamer also notes that the WBP Awards judges especially appreciated books that integrated their spines into the front and back covers, so that the design of the book when it’s spread open creates a unified effect. As for the back cover, Kulamer says a common pitfall is to use a thin, white sans serif font against a dark background. Instead, she recommends using a heavyweight sans serif against a lighter background.

For a book that puts all of these elements together, check out Great Growing At Home: The Essential Guide to Gardening Basics, by Allan A. Swenson, which won a WBP Award for Illustrated Cover or Jacket for a commercial publisher.

Note the simple design that manages to incorporate several different images, the earth-toned images against a wood-like background, the bold font, the emphasis on the word “HOME,” and the clean division between title, subtitle and author.

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