Book cover is one of the most important things of a book. It is used to represent the content of your book, telling your readers what you want them to find in the book. Before we read a book, we must firstly know how its book cover looks like, which means that the book cover will affect the first impression of the book.

For such an important part, we have to ask ourselves several questions before we do the creation. These question will help us to know what we should put in our book cover.

What is the main character of your book?

In fact, the “main character” here may not be a real character. It can be a country for a historical book, the idea of “emotion” for an psychological book, or even a house for an interior design book. It represents your main content, which can help you to design a key vision for your book cover if needed. Also, readers will be willing to know how your main characters look like if you are writing a novels.

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What is the genre of the book?

Same as content, you also need to understand what the genre of your book is, and then think about a style of book cover that fit the genre. For example, you will not show a cute teddy bear on the cover of a medical book, while you will not show a photo of a war on the cover of children’s storybook. The elements on your book cover should fit the genre of the book. Reader will not want to pick a book with content that totally different from its cover. What is the colour tone of the book? When creating the book cover, you may already have an image of it.

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What is the colour of it?

If you still do not have the idea. Think about the above 2 questions again. What is the book talking about? You can then choose a warm colour tone or a cool colour tone for it, or maybe a dark tone if it is about horror topic. Colour tone very important as it is just like the “emotion” of the book. The key vision and the style will tell the readers what the book is talking about, then the colour theme of the book will shows the readers what emotion we expect they will have when reading that book.

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What details do you want to show in your cover?

Different from the idea like content, genre or emotion. This time we are really talking about the information written on the cover. Usually there are 3 main content that is shown in most of the books, including the title, subtitle (if needed) and the name of the writer/ artist. As they are very important, you have to make sure that readers can pay attention on them once they pick up the book. You may point them out by colour, font, position and spacing. Stylish font can also help you to draw their attention.

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Is there any Easter egg?

Easter egg means some messages or details hiding in the story. When you are designing, it will be very great if you can also place some Easter egg in the book cover! They can be some graphics, decorations, pose or other thing else. After the readers finish the book, they will fell surprise if they look at the cover again. It is amazing, isn’t it?

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If you have the answers for all the above questions, it is time to start designing your book cover. It is no longer a difficult task for you as you should already know what you want to included in your design. Match them together as you like and you will then get a unique and amazing book cover!