What Makes a Great Book Cover

Plus a Highly Unscientific Top Ten Covers of the Fall

Book covers are the boardroom seating of the publishing world. Like with who sits where at the C-suite table, book covers offer a template for power struggles or power dynamics to take place. What makes it such a war is that choosing a book cover is a highly consequential yet completely subjective decision. As subjective as books are themselves, there is even more of a gut reaction that comes into play with covers. Some people hate the color orange and you’ll never be able to talk their rational mind into liking an orange cover. Perhaps because of this, no single publishing decision can be as fraught or as painstaking. It’s also incredibly high stakes for the author who is looking for a visual representation of years of their hard work. For most of the first books I worked on, the covers were amazing — the first book I was the editor for remains a perfect gem of a cover — but the process was, frankly, no fun at all. The cover process remains tricky, but over time there are a few things to be learned that makes it easier. First…

Let Go of Personal Taste

Early in my career I found myself going into cover meetings and invariably liking the one or two covers that the rest of the room absolutely hated. At the time I was doing what was natural and what probably 99.9% of people do when they see a book cover: look at it and at a gut level see if they instantly like it. Natural enough, after all that is what consumers do — we scroll or gaze past a dozen covers on a table and stop for a few seconds on the ones that catch our eyes. But as an editor, you’re often called upon to put your personal feelings a bit to the side and read a book with the eyes of a reader, an editor, and a writer. Likewise, as I continued to witness more and more cover processes and watched the alchemy unfold of non-design people talking to design people, I learned that you’re not supposed to be looking with your one set of personal eyes. Over time you start to learn to look at book cover art with the audience in mind, putting pure instant aesthetic judgment off to the side.

What a good book cover does besides draw the eye at a base level is signal to the ideal reader that the book is for them. This does not mean a book cover has to appeal to every reader. There are covers that you may find repulsive or juvenile— chances are those books aren’t for you. In such a fragmented market, where ten or twenty thousand constitutes a good readership, a book cover doesn’t have to appeal in a mass, generic way like a sitcom or a tentpole action film might (even at the extreme end in book publishing we’re talking low millions not high millions). Since the most important factor for book sales remains reader recommendation — word of mouth — an editor and publisher have to decide who their ideal reader is, who will be evangelical about their book once they read it, and which ideal readership is the largest. That means putting aside personal taste and getting a cover that speaks to those readers.

Now this isn’t true for every editor in every situation, as many editors work in genres where they are part of the largest reading demographic for the books they are editing. Moms who edit books for moms, older generations who edit serious history for older generations, Gen Z’ers and young Millennials who edit rom-coms and romances for Gen Z’ers and young Millennials , etc. But when you are not the ideal reading demographic (and men in their 30s rarely, if ever, are), then it is best to let go of your personal taste when looking at a cover and consider…

How it Will Get People to Read the Book

Cover art is art, and at its best you can have it all: commerce, truth, and beauty all together. But sans this perfect scenario, the goal of a book cover should be to get as many people to walk (or scroll) by it, pick it up (click it), and consider reading it as possible. It’s not about if the cover would look good as a poster or framed on the wall. A great book cover communicates to the readers who will like the book that it is a book for them. That’s why so many book covers end up looking the same. Once a book sells well or is beloved by readers, publishers follow the lead and try to create a visual signal that they have a new book that is similar. Photographs vs. illustrations, bright vs. muted colors, and simple vs. handwritten type all fall in and out of fashion accordingly.

Many regular consumers will cry foul and see a certain laziness or staleness in cover design as so many books end up looking the same, especially in certain genres. Book titles share a similar fate— the “Girl” title trend (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, etc.) of the 2010s for psychological suspense and the “X’s Wife” (The Paris Wife, The Shoemaker’s Wife, The Railwaymen’s Wife, etc.) trend in historical fiction. Eventually readers get tired and move on, usually by inches rather than all at once. For example, over time, psychological thriller covers seem to have shifted from women’s faces to houses and landscapes.

The Less Explaining the Better

While it’s important to think differently about instant appeal as an editor, it’s also important to remember how book covers are received: in seconds and without much thought. A cover must work in an instant, not a minute. And a good cover should require little to no explanation. There should be no “this is an amazing visual cue if you’ve read the third act!” rationalization by writer, editor, or publisher. You get approximately three seconds to capture the viewers’ attention, so make it count.

With this rubric and final caveat in mind here are my top 10 covers for books publishing this fall. The methodology here is that I scrolled past 100s of books coming out this fall and picked ones that stood out, and then looked at them for a few minutes longer to explain why they work from an editor’s and publisher’s point of view. See it’s not that hard.

TOP 10 BOOK COVERS OF THIS FALL

10. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Sept. 3)

I was going to rank this higher, as I witnessed, firsthand, someone stop in a book store and pick this up off the table alongside other newly released fiction books. But I’ve seen this cover several times and it took me that many to realize this was a novel, not a work of nonfiction. Maybe that’s the title and not the design, maybe it’s unfair because I only ever glanced at it, but that’s the exercise. A+ for eye-catching cover design, sometimes the visual is so good that the text almost doesn’t matter, certainly a good goal for certain types of literary fiction.

9. Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik (Nov. 12)

Great nonfiction covers, to me, all give off the impression of “it’s not rocket science”. This cover takes two iconic photos and puts the title 38pt font. If you’re interested in the subject(s) there is no way you’re missing this.

8. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Sept. 24)

Let’s be honest here, the bigger the book and the author the more time, attention, and resources get paid to make sure the cover is exactly right. That doesn’t mean it always turns out this way — there are certainly many scenarios where publishers overthink, the author gets too involved, and you get a very important book with a weird, ugly cover. Alas, this is not the case with Sally Rooney’s latest. The designer took a lot of difficult elements — a title that’s unfamiliar and vague, chess, multiple characters — and balanced them beautifully. Yellow/grey is also obviously not the standard colors of a chess board, but a nice callback to her first and third novels, which along with her recognizable name as an author creates a sort of visual identity that carries through.

7. Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa (Aug. 13)

Maybe it’s the Moo-Deng effect, but this cover pulls you in. It actually doesn’t “say” much, but basically the strong image and title are so eye-catching that you just really want to know what is going on with Mina, presumably this hippo-riding girl.

6. The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel (Sept. 24)

A mash-up of all the Hitchcock visual cues, assume this is a thriller with a lot of homage to Hitchcock. After googling…yes, unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what it is. A winner.

5. Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta (Oct. 29)

An awesome cover that has me pulling out my favorite oxymoron in reference to book covers: the new vintage look. This is a sexy horror novel, one assumes (and again assumes correctly). So creepy, yet so beautiful. The descending size of the title words is a genius move by the designer, as your mind reads it probably exactly as it is intended (“feast” is gluttonous and “can” is running out of time, brilliant stuff).

4. The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry (Sept. 24)

Scratch what I said earlier about book covers not needing to be art posters. This is elevated science fiction gold while still maintaining tons of mass appeal.

3. She-Wolves by Paulina Bren (Sept. 17)

See earlier analysis of Didion & Babitz, some covers don’t need to be explained.

2. The Lake of Lost Girls by Katherine Greene (Nov. 5)

In tribute to how this conversation began, let’s celebrate a great execution of a time-honored genre cover, with a “girl” title to boot. No one will say this is the most beautiful, show-stopping, or clever piece of cover art this year, but it does exactly what a really great commercial cover should do: grabs the eye, tells you exactly what type of book is — a suspense, true crime-y novel, something I can tell without even looking it up. The angle of the image, the color, feel fresh while still giving off all the right signals. Bravo.

1. The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Oct. 1)

What I love most about this cover from a distance is that it evokes a kind of 80s/90s big bestseller aesthetic that brings me right back to Borders (RIP). It’s subliminal messaging at its best. It’s also the extremely weird and specific choice to put a second book cover on this book cover that is extremely memorable and eye-catching (and, not so subtlety, reminds you that it is a sequel to a book you’ve already read). Genius.