Book Cover Design

Your cover has one job before it has any other: tell a browsing reader, in about two seconds, what kind of book this is and whether it is for them.

That is a genre problem before it is an aesthetic one. Readers scanning a category page are pattern-matching against hundreds of covers, and those patterns are real — literary fiction and commercial thrillers signal themselves through completely different typographic and photographic conventions. A cover that ignores the conventions of its category reads as amateur even when it is objectively beautiful. So our process starts with research: your designer studies what the current leading titles in your exact category are doing, and briefs against it deliberately.

Then design. You get distinct concepts — genuinely different directions, not three colourways of the same idea — with your feedback shaping the one you select through refinement rounds. Every cover is designed as a full wrap: front, spine and back, with the spine width calculated from your actual page count and paper stock so the print is correct.

We test every cover at thumbnail size, because that is how most readers first meet it. A title that is unreadable at 120 pixels has failed regardless of how it looks at full size. We also check it in greyscale, since a great many covers are first seen on an e-ink screen.

You receive print-ready files and separate optimised versions for retailers and social media. The design is yours, with full commercial rights.