The Five Minute Book Cover Design Challenge
With the onset of digital printing and e-books, authors, in increasing numbers, are requesting friends and relatives familiar with Photoshop, or other forms of web design experience, to develop their book covers. Unfortunately this new trend causes many authors to miss out on a greater value than just how nice a cover looks or how inexpensive to create: that value is marketability.
What separates a book cover designer from the web designer or others design trades is a knowledge and understanding of the constant changes in the publishing industry. You can find “good” designers everywhere. Children are taught such programs early on in school. What’s hard to find, but extremely important, are designers who can implement a strong design to effectively hit an author’s intended readership and market.
The Five Minute Challenge
To illustrate this point, we challenged our designer to design a Photoshop book cover in five minutes. This video depicts a book cover design (front panel only) from beginning to completion in just over five minutes. The point of this illustration isn’t to show how to design your own book cover, but rather to depict that the design (or making something look nice) can take almost no time at all by someone skilled in programs such as Photoshop. However, the foundational and key portions of a book jacket, such as the molding, planning, and mending of such a design to fit a book’s core message, take time and a team of experts. The full process of creating a book jacket takes much more than five minutes. It can take many hours and sometimes days to hit just the right look that will attract readers.
The book jacket design produced in the video below features a fictional title, subtitle, and author name—each selected before beginning the design.
The Five Minute Cover Explained
Here’s a few short details about this fictional story which was used as an example for this design:
- Genre: Fiction
- Age group: 16-30 Male
- Time Period: Medieval
- Main Character: 60 Years old, short, wide face, robe, staff, short grey hair, carries a sword
- Setting: In and around a large Norman Keep styled castle.
In approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds we created our fictional cover design. It looks nice enough, but as you could see in the video, we gave little or no thought to the key elements of this book’s core message. The characters, target market, scenery, typography, and the wide range of elements that make an effective book jacket were overlooked in order to make something that “looks pretty” within the time allotted.
A More Marketable Design
With a bit more forethought, research of the book’s main message, and target readership, we crafted a more effective and unique design. Here’s a second comp that took the book’s story, character, and audience as a basis for every design element:
Professional Designers
While you may have a good friend or student with great design skills, knowledge of proper book jacket design makes the difference. WinePress Publishing is committed to creating the highest quality artwork in order to effectively represent the content and message of each and every book we publish. Our collaborative approach provides flexibility by combining the author’s input with our professional implementation of design. The result is a positive and constructive experience that produces outstanding design. Too many books simply sit on the shelf, so we strive to boost a book’s visibility and marketability through creative and eye-catching design.
WinePress helps authors:
- Create a brand for their books through our creative and effective designs that clearly portray your message.
- Appeal to readers with a marketable cover, designed specifically to attract their attention to your message.
- Boost credibility of our writers with a truly outstanding and well-designed book cover.
- Receive the cover of each authors’ dreams through our collaborative design efforts.
What Do You Think?
Have any questions or thoughts on the video, or about the book cover design process? Leave a comment. We would love to hear any experiences you’ve had with the book design process. We appreciate your feedback!
Unbeatable Book Publishing Quality, with You in Control
It’s time to reform the way we think about book publishing. Stop giving up all your rights. Stop giving up control of the process. Stop settling for mediocre “self-published” books. Start publishing the right way. WinePress provides all the services and representation you need to publish books people will read and enjoy.
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