Book Covers and Layout Part 2: Beyond the Rule of Thirds

If you’ve read Layout Part 1: Rule of Thirds & Diagonal Scan for Book Covers, you have a foundation from which to build designs for great book covers. In fact, you have everything you need to design a professional looking book cover. For those of you seeking...

Graphics and Images for your Book Covers Part 1

As a self-publisher, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from many self-published writers, and to read the review copies of some fantastic self-published books. Through that process, I’ve found that a surprisingly large number are great books that are well edited and...

Book Covers: Copy Placement

If you’ve read the previous articles on typography and spacing, you know how to create professional copy for your book covers using the appropriate typefaces, kerning and point sizes. Now we’ll explore how to orient the text elements within the design to create...

Front and Back Cover Copy for Book Covers

Front Cover Copy for Book Covers This section is designed to help you use copy effectively on your book covers. I can’t offer you tips for creating a clever title or a descriptive subtitle; that’s up to you. And depending on your genre, clever and...

Kerning and Leading: Spacing Letters and Lines on Book Covers

To design great book covers, you’ll need to embrace the idea of tweaking your letters and lines. When we talk about letter and word position, we have two areas to address: the first is the position of the actual letters within a word (kerning); the second is the...