The Most Important Marketing Decision You'll Make
Let's get something out of the way before we go any further: nobody judges a book by its cover until they're on Amazon looking at a grid of twenty similar titles. Then they absolutely judge a book by its cover. Every single time.
I'm not being cynical — I'm being practical. Your cover is doing the heavy lifting before anyone reads a single word of your blurb, let alone your prose. In the indie world, it's competing against traditionally published books with five-figure design budgets. That's the context. So let's talk about how to not get flattened by it.
Genre Conventions Aren't Optional
This is the thing most new indie authors get wrong, and it's the thing most likely to torpedo an otherwise decent cover: they design what they think looks good, instead of designing what signals the right genre to readers who don't know them yet.
Romance readers can identify a romance cover in about half a second. Same with thriller readers, cozy mystery readers, and fantasy readers. They're not consciously cataloguing it — they've just read hundreds of books in the genre and their brain pattern-matches. When your cover doesn't match their expectation, they move on. Not because your book isn't good. Because their brain filed it under "not what I'm looking for" before the conscious mind had a say.
Go to Amazon. Search your genre. Look at the bestsellers. Study the covers. Notice the fonts, the colour palettes, what's in the imagery, how the author name is sized relative to the title. You're not trying to clone anyone — you're trying to signal "this is your kind of book" to exactly the readers who want it.
Romance covers tend toward warm skin tones, couples, and a specific softness in the typography. Thrillers lean into dark palettes, high contrast, and angular fonts. Cozy mysteries have a visual lightness to them — illustrated or stylised imagery, often pastel. Literary fiction takes more creative liberties but generally favours restrained, conceptual covers over literal imagery. Study your genre. Then design for its readers, not for yourself.
The DIY Question
Can you make your own cover? Yes. Should you? Almost certainly not.
I know Canva is free and impressive and it's genuinely great for a lot of things. Book covers for commercial fiction is not really one of them. The problem isn't that Canva is bad — it's that Canva covers tend to look like Canva covers. Readers can't articulate why, but they can feel it. The fonts are slightly off. The stock photography feels slightly generic. The whole thing has a slightly... brochure energy.
AI image generators are getting better, but they bring their own headaches: unresolved legal questions around rights, a certain uncanny quality that's recognisable once you've seen enough of it, and a tendency to produce hands with six fingers if you're not careful. They're a tool, not a solution — at least not yet.
If you're writing niche non-fiction or something that won't be competing on Amazon's genre shelves, a clean DIY cover can work fine. For commercial fiction, get a professional. Your book took months or years to write. A cover that costs you £200 and does its job is a better return on that investment than a free cover that doesn't.
What Professional Actually Costs
Prices vary based on the designer's experience, reputation, and current workload, but here's a rough guide for 2025–2026:
- Premade covers — typically £30–£100. A designer creates a cover speculatively; you buy the rights to add your title and name. Quality varies enormously. A decent option for debut authors on very tight budgets, provided you shop around carefully.
- Custom ebook cover — typically £120–£400 for a solid professional result. More experienced designers in popular genres often charge more, and rightly so.
- Print wraparound cover — adds roughly £75–£200 on top, because it requires the spine and back cover too, and the spine width depends on your exact page count and paper type.
Those numbers will make some people wince. The other way to look at it: if your cover puts off even a handful of readers per day who might otherwise have bought your book, the cost of a bad cover is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of a good one.
Finding the Right Designer
The Reedsy marketplace is the most reliable starting point — designers there are vetted and the platform is built specifically for publishing. 99designs runs cover design competitions if you want multiple options before committing to one designer. Fiverr has everything from excellent to terrible, so approach it with care and examine portfolio samples and reviews very closely before spending a penny.
The better approach, wherever you look, is to find covers you like in your genre and track down who designed them. Many designers list their credits on their websites. That's a far stronger starting point than scrolling a marketplace blind hoping someone's thumbnail appeals to you.
Joel Friedlander's Book Cover Archive is useful for studying what's working by genre — it's essentially a curated gallery of published covers, and spending an hour there will teach you more about genre conventions than any amount of theorising.
How to Write a Proper Brief
Your brief is as important as the designer's skill. A vague brief produces vague covers. Be specific:
- Your genre and subgenre
- Your target audience (age range, reading habits, where they buy)
- Three to five comparable covers that hit the right tone — not necessarily books in your genre, just covers with the energy you're after
- The mood you want to convey
- The exact title and author name, spelled exactly as you want them to appear
- Anything you specifically don't want — "no faces," "avoid red," "nothing too dark"
Designers are skilled at what they do, but they cannot mind-read. The more specific your brief, the better your first draft will be, and the fewer expensive revision rounds you'll need.
The Thumbnail Test
Before you approve anything, view the cover at thumbnail size. Amazon displays ebook covers at roughly 160 by 260 pixels in search results — sometimes smaller on a phone screen. If the title is unreadable at that size, or the image turns to indistinct blur, it needs to go back for revisions. A cover that only looks good at full size is a cover that won't do its job where it matters most.
Your cover isn't a piece of art to be admired in isolation. It's a sales tool. It's entirely fine if it's also beautiful — but that's not its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to make the right reader stop scrolling, look twice, and click through. Design it accordingly.
Getting the cover right is one of the key decisions in any book launch strategy. If you want a structured way to plan everything else that goes with it — timing, pricing, advance reader copies, launch window — WIPsage walks you through the whole thing step by step.