How to Work with a Cover Designer on Your Non-Fiction Book Cover

Your book cover is the packaging of your product, and it must be something that appeals to your reader, stands out on a bookshelf, virtual or real, and makes you feel good when you look at it. This means you need a great cover designer. But even if you get a great designer, how do you work with one to get the COVID that you need? Well, if you're wondering how to get the best possible cover design from your designer, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of a fabulous professional self publishing services company, Book Launchers. Now, if you only watch these videos, you might think I'm actually Book Launchers, when in fact there is an entire team of extremely talented people who are doing the hard work of making books great and selling them and supporting the authors. And one of those brilliant people is Cassie, our resident design expert. In January, my team hosted a fabulous 22 hour deep dive training session. That's something we do 10 months of the year as our way of supporting the author community to create better books and get better results from them. And this deep dive was on cover design trends and the ways to get the best book cover design for your book. If you missed that session, well, this is a small excerpt from that session, but you really should get yourself on our newsletter list right now so you never miss another one. Head to book launchers.com newsletter to get signed up right now and get those hookups. Now that you're going to catch all our future deep dive trainings, let's get you caught up on what you missed. So who is Kassy and what are you going to need to bring to the table so she can give you her best or one of the other fabulous designers on our team that she works with so they can give you the best, or if you're not doing your book with book launchers, well, how you can guide your designer in the process. All right, take it away, Cassie.

I love all things design. I went to art school in San Francisco. I've been working in publishing for a long time. I used to work at SF Weekly, LA Weekly, OC Weekly. And I am so, so happy to be with Book Launchers. I love me some cover design. So today I want to talk about working with your designer. There's a lot of designers work in different ways, but generally as art people, we're weird and quirky. So there's some, some, you know, a little bit of information on how to communicate with us, what kind of information to give us and ultimately get the best covers possible first and Foremost. So these are some things that we actually request in book launchers when we're talking to a client. And it's just a lot of information that helps the designer build your covers, and it's important. I know some of them seem really obvious, but I'm going to dive into what they mean. So design elements. This could be anything related to your brand. So let's say you want your book cover to kind of emulate your website, and this is a corporate book cover. You want the colors to match, you want the fonts to match. So all of that information is super necessary to give to your designer. Maybe, you know, to give you, like, a unified look between the two. Maybe it's the complete opposite, and it has nothing to do with another project, and it's independent on its own. But still, anything that's, you know, relevant to that particular cover, you're going to want to supply. So maybe that's photos, maybe it's a book series. Maybe you've already created. You already have two books and you're now working on your third. So definitely give that designer those first two copies so they have something to reference your target market. So your target audience of your book is important to give to your designer because it says a lot about what that cover is going to look like. So maybe it has a more masculine for it's, you know, geared towards men, so it's going to have a more masculine feel to it. Or the opposite. Maybe it needs to have a little feminine touch to it. So maybe we're putting some script fonts on it, but definitely giving them that information, which also kind of leads into our book description. So the book description is incredibly important because you have to imagine that as the designer, we know nothing about this project. Right. It'd be like contacting an architect and saying, build my dream home. But I'm not going to tell you how many bedrooms there are or how many bathrooms or if I want a pool or anything like that. So you want to give them all of the content necessary to kind of get a bigger picture of what this book is going to look like. Now, the next one seems really obvious. Of course you're going to give them your title and your subtitle, but it's really about understanding what the title and the subtitle mean to your designer. So your designer is often going to connect imagery with your title and subtitle. That's just our immediate go to. So, for example, this cover here, Raising Doctors, the Med School Admissions Success Guide for Parents of Future Physicians. So as soon as I see that, as soon as I see that title, I'm thinking, okay, doctors, you know, med school. Those are the things that are connecting to my brain. So I start pulling imagery that correlates with that. And I was lucky enough to find this beautiful image of this graduation cap on a stethoscope. It really worked out well. It really spoke to the author. But there are times where maybe the title, the doctor title on its own isn't enough, where we have this cover and the title Love Made simple as a designer doesn't mean too much to me when I start thinking about images. However, what's really important on this is the subtitle. So a Guide to Inner Peace, Contentment and Success. So that really speaks to that, like, you know, Zen idea and this calming emotion that we want to put forth on the COVID So I'm looking up images like these rocks and this really calming, you know, background image.

Cassie is giving a mini course on design here, and I don't even want to stop her, but I did want to jump in and encourage you to give her a big, huge thumbs up because this is someone that is normally behind the scenes creating. So I thought it was really awesome that she stepped up and shared this incredible presentation. High five, Cassie. So now she is going to get into some examples of covers she's worked on for our authors. And when she does that, she's going to give you some of the behind the scenes of what the client gave to her to work with and how that translates to the finished product. Hopefully this gives you some sparks for your own project.

Anytime we build comps or compositions, we always want to build one of the covers that is geared towards what you requested. Right. So we always want something to bring your vision to life. Sometimes it can happen, sometimes it's difficult. It depends on the idea. But we always want to try our hardest to get close to what you requested. So here's an example. I can click on it. This client, Real Flow. So this one was hard because the subtitle on this one is, for me, creatively, I couldn't really connect it to an image. She was really specific about the emotion that she wanted to feel through this, which was this feeling of movement. And to hear that from an authority is incredibly helpful. So you're thinking, all right, so movement. And I'm looking at all these sorts of images of, you know, how do you express that on a cover? And we were really lucky to find this image that really shows that. So on this cover, the icons at the bottom were absolutely Necessary for this author. This was something that had to appear on every single cover. So this is kind of going back to your design elements, right? This is telling your designer. I, whatever you do, this has to be on it. So we kind of came up with our own concept, but every single one had these icons. So definitely supply that to your designer. So Robert Workman, he really requested this, like, vintage detective feel, which I thought was really cool. And he was super stoked because we nailed it. And it's even those. That description that he gave us is so important. So if you're looking for, like, a vintage style or a 70s feel, it's so stylistic that it helps us really narrow in what you're looking for. And then what I'm searching for, what images I'm looking for, what typefaces I'm looking for. So any information, any ideas that you guys have, absolutely give it to your designer. So if you are looking on Amazon and or in a bookstore, you take a photo of any book, it doesn't have to relate to your genre at all, but maybe books that just stand out to you as a creative. There's so much said in those examples. So we usually ask for about three of them. And what that does and things that I may see that you may not are some trends within those covers that I can start to pick out. So maybe I see, like, oh, they really like a lot of white space, which I love a lot of white space. So I, you know, maybe you're picking up. Maybe I start picking up on that. Or like, ooh, they like a lot of color. And it may be things that you don't notice, but as a designer, I'm absolutely picking up on that.

A lot of this is just a kickstart to give them ideas to start with. Sharing likes and dislikes is important too. Once you give your designer all this information, here's what a great designer is going to do with it, and a little bit of a look at the process that goes into a great cover design.

A lot of what happens, at least for my own process, and this doesn't mean that this is every designer's process, but for my own, and some people, most people, I'm checking out the competition I'm looking at. And in book launchers, we do this 100%. We're looking at your top five category on Amazon. Right? What are those covers look like inspiration to me, as I am a super nerd. I love to look at new fonts. What's trending, which we will talk about talking, you know, Looking at some new images or what's out on there or what's out in the market, what's, you know, new in design, anything to keep your book relevant and also to keep my skills relevant. So conceptualizing and pulling images. This is like where I go into, like my cave of design. Here I'm sitting at the computer and I am just pulling images. I use it, we use Adobe stock, and I am just gathering content based on all the information that you gave me.

Can I tell you a little secret? I don't want to repost the entire two hour deep dive here, but I'm also struggling to cut anything Cassie says out. She shared so, so much amazing content and insights into the mind of a designer that you just won't get from me. So I won't let this go on for an hour. But I must share her teachings on typography because fonts go out of date. And I also know one of the most exciting things for Kassy is getting a new font package. Who knew? There's so much to know about fonts. Like some fonts will not work with certain imagery or a certain type of book. So enjoy this look into text typography before we close off this session on working with your designer to get the best cover design.

So typography. I am a super nerd for typography. I love it. It is my life. People ask me what I do on the weekends and I download fonts. It's embarrassing, but I am telling you all anyway. I love it. And so I think typography is so important on your cover. It can convey so many different messages. You know, if you, let's say, I don't know, you have a book about construction and I'm putting on some frilly willy fonts. Maybe it just doesn't pair well and it sends the wrong message. Maybe I'm using like a really outdated font and it reminds you of a spa. And you know, actually Jacqueline and I were talking about Avatar. I don't know if you guys have seen that, what that logo looks like. And there's this SNL skit and it's hilarious and it's Jacqueline. What's his name? What's that actor's name? Brian Gosling. Yes. Ryan Gosling is making fun of the Avatar type because it's papyrus and it's your general typeface that you can find in any program. And he said that here's this beautiful movie and all the guy did was click a dropdown menu and clicked on papyrus and that was it. And that was his logo for the movie. And I find it's hilarious because it's true, he did do that. But it also works in this situation. Typefaces matter. And being a nerd like that, I definitely start to dive into new typefaces. What's current, what's trending. I definitely don't want to use something that's outdated. But also there's some classic fonts that could really work for you. But even the weight of a font. So a weight of a font would be something thin or bold. And then you have, you know, font families that have semi bold and extra condensed and there's all sorts of different fonts and every single one means something different. So it's incredibly important. What I put here is showing you basically, if nobody knows the difference between them, we have a serif font on the left and then sans serif in the middle and then a combo on the right. And that's kind of like a general guide that we give to clients to say, what do you like now?

What do you like? Tell me in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some sweet hashtag, no boring books swag. Also, do you know the difference between serif and sans serif fonts? Here's a quick lesson.

So your serif fonts have these little guys here. See these little dudes? Those guys. And it's, you know, your classic, like Times New Roman, right? That's a. Excuse me, that is a serif font. And then here your sans serif fonts are going to be these more modern looking fonts which are making a comeback in 2023, which is super exciting because I love me a sans serif. But you can see the difference in here. You guys see these, how those little guys are hanging off the edge. So over here you have your combination. So here's your sans serif. Sans serif here. And now your subtitle is in a serif.

Okay, so now you have a foundation of what your cover designer needs from you, what you can expect them to do, and what elements are important for your coverage. In next week's video, I'm going to share my team's advice for going through cover design reviews and revisions. So if you haven't already, make sure you've subscribed to the channel with those notifications on. So you get the gold when we put it up here for you. Cassie is going to walk you through what a good set of comps from a designer will look like, along with some tips for choosing your final cover. There is so much you probably don't know about what goes into a great cover design, and this is a mini masterclass worth thousands to you in getting a great cover. In the meantime, you might be thinking about your book title and wondering if you're giving your designer something good to work with. This video right here is definitely one to watch for that one. And this one right here is all about the three questions your book cover design should answer. Both are guaranteed good watching, so please head on over and then let me know when you get there.