Anatomy of a Book Cover

Your How-To Guide on Judging a Book the Wrong Way the Right Way

Greetings friends, Romans, and Shelf Life readers. Welcome to March. Tuesday’s article was actually in time for March and I should have properly welcomed you then, but Tuesday’s article was meant for today and today’s article was intended for Tuesday and it all got mixed up but anyway it’s March now. Look, I don’t make the rules. I mean, technically I make the Shelf Life rules but I don’t make the rules about what month it is when.

Personally I am appalled that we let March waltz back in after the way it behaved last time and we didn’t give it a stern talking-to but I am not the boss of how humanity responds to March so I’m going to have to let that go.

Today’s article is about how to judge a book by its cover. And also book covers in general—and how they get put together—and how that ties into the act of judging the book by said cover. This is one of these low-effort articles on my part. As it happens, I am sick. Hopefully not with the zeitgeistial plague. Whenever I don’t have a lot of energy to put into writing I trot out one of these topics. The ones I know a lot about so they don’t require much critical thinking to discuss intelligently. For some reason these always end up being the most popular articles. The message you are sending me when you like these articles is effort is a waste and life is meaningless. 

I appreciate you.

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. That little cliché has been bopping around the English language for hundreds of years and people just repeat it like it’s true. In a sense, it’s somewhat true. When people say “don’t judge a book by its cover” they’re saying you should not judge anything purely or solely on its outward appearance and in many situations that is true. For instance, you should not judge people on how they look. That does not mean you do not glean any information about them from their appearance or presentation, but it cautions you against judging them exclusively by the information you deduce from looking at them.

Books are a little bit different, though. The cover of a book exists almost entirely to persuade us to purchase and read the book while pretending they are really just giving us pieces of the book’s metadata that we can ingest and interpret with our meat brains. The book cover says, “Hey, look at me—you can glean information from my appearance, like the title of this book and the name of its author!” But in fact, the book cover is really trying to tell you to spend money on it. Book covers are trying as hard as they can to get you to judge their contents worth of your investment of time and money. They are asking to be judged. They want to be judged. 

At least, this is true when they are designed professionally, by someone who understands them well, with editorial and marketing input. If you are an author looking to self-publish your book, you might not have access to all of that but you can get a good start on it in this article. If you’re a reader looking for tips on how to distinguish a well-produced book from a poorly produced book, you’ll find that in here, too.

The front cover of a book is affectionately referred to as C1, or cover one. At least I’ve heard it called that pretty much everywhere I’ve worked. Maybe other places call it something else. Anyway, C1 is the front cover. The back cover is C4, or the fourth panel of the book’s cover. If you’re looking at a paperback or a casebind, this is pretty confusing because there’s only one more panel—the spine. Is the spine C2, then, or C3? It’s neither haha the spine is just the spine. The remaining pieces, C2 and C3, are the front and back flaps (respectively) of a dust jacket or gatefold paperback. If you take a dust jacket off a book and spread it out flat on a table with the design side up and oriented so that you can read it, then from left to right you’re looking at C3 (back flap); C4 (back cover); spine; C1 (front cover); C2 (front flap).

Those five panels—or three if you’re doing a traditional paperback—are pretty much all the space you have to sell your book to a casual observer of the physical object, so you need to make the most of them. You can put as many praise pages as you want in the front matter but nobody is ever going to see those unless they pick up the book first because the cover attracted them.

Your front cover should have, at a very bare minimum, the title of your book and the author’s name. Whether the author’s name comes before the title or after, and whether the author’s name is in larger letters than the title or smaller, has to do with how famous the author is. The more well-known you are, the more likely someone is to pick up your book based on your name and look at the title second. For instance, consider how large Stephen King’s name is on the front cover of all his books compared to the size of the title. King’s name, and especially his surname, is much larger than anything else. 

For a particularly interesting example of the relativity of fame and name recognition, look at the covers of George R.R. Martin’s books. The first book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series is A Game of Thrones. Pretty much everyone has heard the phrase “game of thrones” and knows what that is, while a smaller (but still substantial) subset of everyone knows the name “George R.R. Martin.” That’s why, on the cover of this particular book, the title is so much larger than the author’s name. Now check out A Dance With Dragons, book five in the same series but not the titular name of the related television show—author name and title get equal billing. But then, take a look at a book by Martin that isn’t part of his most famous series, for instance, Dreamsongs. More people know about “George R.R. Martin” than know about “dreamsongs”—whatever that is, right?—so not only is his name featured much more prominently than the title of the book but the cover of Dreamsongs also references A Game of Thrones even though the two series are completely unrelated.

When you look at a lot of self-published books, you’ll see the author has designed their cover (or their cover has been designed) in this same way—with the author’s name featured above the title and in larger print. This makes a lot of sense for successful self-published authors who have built up name recognition among their fans. This makes no sense at all for someone who is not already famous and who is publishing their first book. I suspect many first-time authors look to their comps to see how that cover was designed. You might say, “Well my book is a bit like a Sue Grafton, so let me see how Sue Grafton’s covers look and make one like that.” But Sue Grafton books sell because they say “Sue Grafton” on them and everything that comes after is extra. If you don’t have that kind of name recognition, you’re better off making your title more prominent.

Keep in mind that even very famous bestselling authors can be outshined by a famous title. Take a look at the covers of the Twilight series or the Harry Potter series. Those series names have more recognition than their authors’ names. Rowling is about as big as authors get but her name is less famous than her creation’s.

If someone well-known has said something flattering about your book or it has won an award, that’s another item you might put on C1. Primarily, you’re going to be focused on those two pieces of information—title and author name—and the eye-catching design or illustration that you’re using.

In traditional publishing, authors don’t get as much of a say in their book cover design as you might think. There’s a great reason for this, which is that unless an author is also an artist, designer, or illustrator, book cover design is outside their area of expertise. If you are publishing traditionally, I would strongly advise against trying to overrule the team of professionals whose job it is to know about book cover design.

I knew an author once to reject three beautiful covers in a row and then insist on using a full bleed stock-art image of an alien (like a gray moon man with a big head) wearing headphones and sitting in front of a computer. And then insist the whole thing be bright purple. It was a book on business communication or something. This author made a bad life choice and his editor let him get away with it because it wasn’t worth the publisher’s time to keep arguing about it. Don’t be that author.

If you’re self-publishing, cover design is not the place to take a DIY approach and save some money. If you absolutely, positively have to save some money on cover design, my advice is to go with a designed rather than an illustrated cover. Illustration just has more room to go catastrophically wrong. There’s a great explanation of photos versus illustrations versus designs for book covers that you can read here to understand the differences.

Your spine doesn’t give you a lot of space to mess around, but it should have the book title (again), the author’s name (again), and the publisher’s name and logo. Not having a publisher’s name and logo on the spine is an immediate dead giveaway that the book was self-published—if I’m holding a physical book in the first place. In reality, the decision to buy a self-published book is almost never made by a person holding a print copy of the book in their hand in a store. Even if someone decides to buy a print copy of your self-published book, odds are excellent that they’re purchasing from an online retailer like Amazon because it’s near impossible to get a brick-and-mortar bookstore to carry a self-published book. If you don’t have a publisher logo to put on there, don’t sweat it. Doesn’t really matter.

The back cover of your book, C4, is where readers are going to look next if your C1 was interesting enough for them to pick up your book, so make this count. This is where you put your blurbs. A blurb is any piece of promotional text about your book. Some common blurb types you see on book covers include:

• Endorsements, meaning a quotation from someone whose opinion is relevant (usually another author or critic) endorsing the book.

• Author bio, a short paragraph about the author that will ideally focus more on their writing accomplishments than on where they live and with how many pets.

• Book description, a summary of the plot written to intrigue the reader enough that they want to read more. Many people tell me they don’t understand why every book doesn’t have this because this is the thing they find most valuable.

• Praise for the author’s other works or accomplishments.

What you put on your back cover is going to vary depending on the market you’re trying to reach and what you have on hand to work with. If you’ve received a lot of advance praise for your book from notable people, then those endorsements are a good bet, but choose your endorsers judiciously. Don’t run an endorsement from your mom on C4 unless readers care who your mom is and what she thinks (Shelf Life cares what your mom thinks). If you’re just starting out as an author, a well-crafted brief summary of your book, pitching it to the reader, is your best bet. You’ll need to sell your book based on its merits, not on your personal fame or the laurels you’ve gathered for previous good works.

Before I go take some Nyquil and leave reality for a while, let me tell you a funny, real-life, absolutely true story about blurbs. I was prepping copy for C1 and C4 of a dust jacket of a business book and the editor who supplied the copy had given us a one-word endorsement to place prominently on C1: “...Excellent...” (which was then attributed to whatever reviewer the advance reader copy had been sent to). I noticed that the full endorsement was not included anywhere else on the jacket, so I wrote the editor’s assistant and said, “Hey I need the rest of the endorsement you took the pull quote from so I can run it with the rest of the endorsements, we can’t just take a single word out of context like that or people might think we’re being dishonest.” The editorial assistant sent back the rest of the endorsement, which read: “This might be the worst book I have ever read but would make an excellent doorstop.”

That right there’s the content you really read for. Don’t think I don’t know that. Thanks for reading anyway, as always, whatever the reason. You let me get away with the word zeitgeistial and I noticed you look the other way just this once. Shelf Life readers, you the best around.

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